Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Stealthing: Not a Mistake, Not a Misunderstanding, But a Violation

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Stealthing—it sounds like something out of a spy movie, but in reality, it’s a serious violation of consent. In this episode, we unzip what stealthing really is: when someone removes a condom during sex without their partner’s knowledge or consent. It’s a practice that crosses every ethical line, yet it’s still only legally recognized as sexual assault in one state (California).Together with our guest Dr. Jenn Evans, we dig into the legal gaps, the cultural double standards around contraception, and the toxic influence of “red pill” ideology that excuses men’s harmful actions while blaming women. We talk about the human impact—how stealthing robs people of their bodily autonomy—and why shifting societal attitudes about consent is as important as changing the laws.This conversation also shines a light on broader gendered expectations: why women are still blamed for pregnancies despite using contraception, why men’s reproductive sabotage is minimized, and how harmful online communities groom young men into entitlement and misogyny.At the heart of it all, this episode is about consent, power, and respect. Because no matter what the law says, removing someone’s choice is never okay.If you or someone you know has experienced stealthing or any form of sexual assault, you are not alone—and support is available. You can reach out to RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. They’re available by chat and phone 24/7.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestionsIf you want to ask Dr Sue a sex question for the weekly Q&A you can submit it here: Ask a question

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about and, you know, the ones you don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. So no judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversation. And before we get started today, we've got some exciting news. Unzipping Taboos is now partnered with JackandJillAdult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And because you're here with us, you get 20% off your purchase with code UNZIPPING20 at checkout. So now that we've got the business out of the way, today we're unzipping stealthing, the practice of stealthing with Dr. Jen, our very special guest. And

we'll get to her introduction in a minute. But before we do, hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie. How's it going? It's going well. I know I say this every episode. I'm really excited. I'm always excited when we have a guest so excited and i'm so excited it's dr jen yay well you want to give our listeners a little bit about your background before we get started if i might this is like a constant fight with us so if i must it's an internal battle with yourself so so i have a phd in human sexuality education and i work in academia um for most of my day and then at night i think we're gonna do

with this now. Academic by day, sex educator by night. So I do work in academia. I do the research thing and do the writing thing and do the teaching thing. But then I also do a lot of work in the community. And I'm going back to doing live events now. So if you're interested in having me and Charlie come out, absolutely reach out to us and let us know. I'm also doing a lot of work with anyone who's got questions. So if that is you and you have an anonymous sex question you'd like answered, just submit it through the description, through the link in the description that I will remember to put in there. And you can submit a question and then every Sunday I choose one and I answer it all over social media. But I really just want to get, I just want to get moving on

this episode. So that's it. That's my entire intro for today. So we're going to turn it over to Charlie. For those of you who do and do not know Charlie, Charlie is our very curious co-host who's always ready to unzip the taboos related to all these topics that we talk about. So tell us more Charlie uh it's Dr. Sue and I have been friends for many years and found that we have these kind of candid conversations it's a friendship contract that I've not been able to find a loophole in so here we are I am I got invited to co-host this uh this podcast with her um as a result of her students challenging her like where's your content out in the out in the wild. And then I am just someone that enjoys challenging expectations,

societal expectations, especially ones that are conditioned into women as we grow up and challenging those things and having conversations because I'm a human and I'm navigating life and there really shouldn't be that many different rules for us as we're all trying to get through this together. And many of you may remember that I also describe myself as a psychology hobbyist. So no informal training except several college classes and just a general interest in the psychology of humans and how we do this humanity thing together while we're all here. So that's enough about me. So what I do is just take all my friends and make them come on shows and do work So basically, Charlie got pressed into doing the podcast. And then Dr. Jen, who I have worked with at previous institutions, and is a fantastic teacher and researcher, I was like, you need to be on the podcast. So be careful, my friends, this is where you wind up at some point. Either that or you wind up a story in my classroom.

But Dr. Jen, fully consensual, right? Nobody forced anybody here on the show. Correct. No coercion. Dr. Jen, you want to tell us a little bit about you? Yeah, absolutely. So first, thank you both for having me, or voluntold. You picked the day. You were actively involved in this. I did. I did. I was an active participant. You're right. I was an active participant. Well, hello, everyone. I am Dr. Jen Evans. And like Dr. Sue, I'm an academic. I am an expert in health education and sexual health. And that is primarily what I do. I have been an educator now

for about 13, maybe going on 14 years now. I feel like you start to lose count after 10. After 10, it's like sometime. I've done it for a while. You just start saying over a decade. Yeah, over a decade. And I really love it, love teaching, teach a class in health education and providing that expertise as well as sexual and reproductive health. And I do a lot of research now and primarily do a lot of research with my students. And it's been really fun and really enriching, but also has been very interesting in uncovering more sexual health topics and the things that we find. So I just want to clarify when you say that you're doing

research with your students, it's in conjunction with them as researchers. as collaborators for people who don't know that and i'm sure you use some of your classes too but um for for research subjects but i think for people who don't know anything about research they're like wait what yes i am not researching my students we do research on students on college age students um but yeah working and collaborating with my students so when we were trying to figure out topics for the show this immediately came to mind because i know we had been talking about your research that was on stealthing i remember that was one of the first things i learned when i when i met you was you were telling me all about this and i'm like that's a fascinating topic to study

and so we wanted to have you on to talk about this and so i'm just gonna let you like if you can explain stealthing and what you found and i'm sure we'll have questions so oh yeah so um stealthing is otherwise known as non-consensual condom removal so it's basically the covert or secret act of removing a condom during sexual intercourse without the other person's knowledge. So it's a real violation of your partner's consent because, you know, there is an agreement whenever you begin a sexual activity that a condom is going to be used. And so this is really happening without the other person's knowledge. And so it's a violation of that consent and a violation of the person's body at the same time, because that's not obviously what they signed up

for. When you say violation of the person's body means sexual assault. Yes, it is a form of sexual assault. However, I will say, and that's a question I get very commonly from students every time I explain, you know, this is the kind of stuff that I study is, you know, is it really classified as sexual assault. And that's one of the hard areas that we're kind of facing and a challenge because there's only one state that has passed any kind of legislation where stealthing is, you know, on the books and that is California. And it's actually under sexual battery. Otherwise it's one of those issues of, you know, sexual assault is always hard because it's, you know, it always devolves into this sort of he said, she said, or he said, he said kind of conversation.

But that seems to be the only state that's actually done something about it. There was a stealthing act of 2022 that was trying to get pushed through, but there has been no progress made on that. And there was also a secondary, you know, coinciding bill that was consent is key in 2022. And that one also did not make any progress as well. So we're kind of stalled on the front of how this is, you know, legally categorized in several different states and in the U.S. And federally. Yes. Other countries have already passed things much sooner than we have,

which is not surprising. I was going to say, should we allow time for people to be shocked that the U.S. is behind? I know so so let me just jump in for a second because I think this is something that actually confuses people because when we talk about rape especially I know for my classes they just assume like there's a definition of consent and there's a definition of what rape is and then I have to be like no no like we do have a federal definition we use especially for data collection but it is different from state to state and I think that's shocking for a lot of people like they're like well it's just rape like why are there separate definitions and I'm like well for a really long

time a lot of states had very specific gendered language and so that technically men couldn't be raped by men but we know that that happens so i just want to throw out if you're like wait what like how how do we not know it's because every state does have different laws um and one of the things i just want to jump in and say and i'm sure you're going to get to it but i'm going to take it away from you is that if this has happened to you i don't really give a damn about the legal definition if you were violated you were violated and we may not you know they may not be able to prosecute but you should still take care of yourself and try to find support systems so if you're in california well that's a whole other conversation about being in california but if

you're in california it sounds like you actually have some legal protection but if you don't like i always tell people don't get caught up in what the definition is if you were violated you were violated and so yeah we're we're probably gonna throw some resources into the the description for the show. So if, if we're getting a little too close to home or this happened to you or something similar, um, we'll put some resources, please take care of you, whether or not that's actually met a definition of assault, but now that's out of the way. So, no, I think that's a really good point. And I, I talk about it in class every single time of this is what, you know, the legal recourse is, but this is sexual assault period. There is no other explanation or, but, or what

if, or, or there's nothing about that. That's exactly what it is. You're really taking away somebody's ability to have ownership over their bodies and to be able to control what happens to their bodies. And that in itself is enough of an issue. Yeah. I just want to echo what you're both saying around kind of the legal and policy landscape around, around this, this piece of sexual assault legislation and all of that, because it can leave those who have experienced the violation in some kind of limbo. Because I think what we are taught is that the law is there to protect you. And then as we grow up, what we find out is it's not really there to protect us, it's there to protect others or make it more difficult for you to prove. So you could have

a challenge of proving that it happened or there's just a lot of gaps in the law and prosecution as many of us know is very rare around sexual assault. So if you feel, if this happened to you and you're like did i get violated because you know society things in society don't really support my feeling about it you did and in their support and we believe you yeah so for those of you not watching by the way as charlie was saying that the laws aren't going to protect us everybody else on the call is just shaking their head like no so yeah we do we do have folks who just listen so you're you're missing all the silent judgment so i kind of want to ask two questions so i don't know what you're gonna have to answer you don't have to do anything but I'd like you to answer

both at some point and like part of me wants to know why you chose this and part of me just wants to know what you found so I don't know like which you want to do first well I guess let's start with how I got here so when I did my dissertation now feels like ages ago um really long time ago I did my dissertation on hookup behaviors and on condom negotiation strategies of college women. And so I'm going to pause there because the teacher in me is like, let me explain what negotiation strategies are. It's essentially the things that you do in order to persuade your partner to use a condom. So it's verbal acts and nonverbal acts. So something very upfront and direct like saying we need to use a condom or saying did you hear that so-and-so got pregnant

we should probably use protection or doing things like putting the condom on your partner or having condoms next to your bed if you're you know bringing someone home or something like that so it's very specific things to do in order to try to make that possible so in my research which I really enjoy, you know, also looking at condom negotiation strategies, I also started to find the flip side of that. And that is condom use resistance tactics. So how people are like, oh, I have to persuade someone to use a condom. There's also the same sort of methods that are used in order to persuade someone to not use a condom. And one of them through previous research done by some really fantastic people like Kelly Q. Davis, I worship her from afar, is

stealthing. It's on there on the scale that, you know, is commonly used to measure condom use resistance tactics, but it doesn't call it stealthing. It says removing a condom during sexual activity. So it's giving more of a description to the person who's answering our research surveys of do you do this thing? Yes or no. and so looking at that I thought that is very interesting people are doing this they're just

taking condoms off in the middle of sex not telling someone and then just keep going and you know dealing with the repercussions later because there's obviously a lot of repercussions from that STIs unwanted pregnancy you know the psychological issues of having your consent violated, like we've already said. So I started looking more into that and started noticing that there was a lot of conversation in the media around this time of, oh, stealthing is a thing and it's happening and it's happening a whole lot. And I actually weirdly around that time started watching a show on HBO called I May Destroy You. It's actually a British television show and great title i don't even know what it's about but i'm like that's a great title

it's uh it's got the same woman in it who stars in the show chewing gum do you all know that british show i do not that one's more of a comedy this one's a little bit more um dramatic in its topics um but one of the episodes she has sex with a partner of hers and then finds out afterwards that he had taken the condom off during the middle of it and then he starts giving her all of these excuses of well it just came off or no we said that we weren't going to do it there was a lot of weird dialogue in there that made it very obvious that this was very intentional on his part and that he had actually maybe looked up some information on the internet on here is how you respond whenever you're confronted by a partner by this and so I started thinking about

it more and I thought this is something that is very interesting very disturbing but very interesting and something that seems to not be studied very widely in public health now legally it's been studied a little bit and there's a very good article the very first person who started writing about it, Alexandra Brodsky. She wrote an article. I forget what the full title is, but I know it says rape adjacent is part of the title. And she starts talking about basically talking to people who had been stealthed and what that experience was like. And she's going into more of the legal issues around this. And so there's a lot of information in that article that even talks about the website that was available at that time, it seems like it's not

available anymore, thank God, by this guy named Mark Benton. And it was a top 10 ways to stealth your partner. And it was essentially on like an online forum of here's a how to do this. And so the more I started digging into it, the more I was like, this is a real problem. And it was happening it seems like from a lot of the reddit digging that i was doing because i love to go digging on reddit for stuff um it was happening a lot with men who have sex with men but then there's also happening to between heterosexual couples and it seems to just leave the same kind of aftermath is a person is very jarred a lot of the posts i've seen on reddit they go on there and they start talking about this happened to me was this sexual assault would this have happened

to me if I had done x y and z and also just talking about why like why would a person do something like this so that kind of led me to be like this is something that I want to explore more because I want to find out why is this happening how much is this happening to people and what are people's opinions around this specific topic. So in some of the research I've done primarily with students for their like final culminating project, we gave out a survey a couple years ago and asked people, here are all of these condom use resistance tactics. We asked college age men and women and non-binary folks and everyone, you know, have you done any of these things? And then we asked them other questions in there about, do you think that removing a condom without your partner's knowledge is ever okay?

Do you think that this should be labeled a sexual assault? Now, I have done this survey twice now at two different institutions, and I will say that the responses are sort of night and day. Or maybe it just is simply that at the time that I first did it, people didn't really know what that was and what we were talking about. and now people have a little bit more of a firmer grasp on what stealthing is and how bad it is but the responses were very different it was a lot of no this shouldn't be sexual assault yes there's certain times whenever it's okay for you to remove a condom without your partner's knowledge which for those people who are listening sue is out doing a lot of hand motions a lot of hand emotions, a lot of facial expressions, a lot of facial, the rage. Yeah. Yeah. You feel it.

And then, you know, looking at the stuff that we've gotten recently, it's a lot more clear of like, no, this is 1000% not okay. This should never happen. That is, there's never an excuse where you should remove a condom and not tell your partner and keep them informed about it. And again, I don't know if it's a, you know, a time period thing, right? Like we've done more effort in sex education about consent and especially with high school age students and they're kind of, you know, moving down to this college atmosphere and they get talked to a lot in college as well about consent. And so that may be one of the things. But what we consistently find, though, is that men will report and say things at the beginning of the survey of we'll ask them two questions. Have you ever tried to persuade a partner into not using a condom? Yes. No. Have you ever physically forced somebody to not use a condom during sexual intercourse? Yes or no. And they'll check off no, but then once they get to those condom use resistance tactics, and we are asking them since age 14, how many times in your lifetime have you done these specific things, they start marking off five times, 10 times, one time, 14 times. And so it's very obvious that there's, you know, some kind of disconnect there between they don't think that that's what they're doing, but then they're getting shown all of these different things. And I don't know if that's confronting maybe something within them of, well, that's my hope of, you know, these are problematic behaviors, but stealthing is one of those ones that always gets checked off.

And it is written in that language of, have you ever removed a condom during sexual intercourse without your partner's knowledge? And, you know, that's getting checked off on there. So we are finding that that is still a behavior that's happening. And it is really unfortunate. There's some different avenues we're hoping to go down sometime soon. And I don't know if we want to go down this rabbit hole today. um but it's a lot of like intersecting now this is my my new thing is intersecting now with a lot of

the dating practices that are coming out of the manosphere and kind of this we own women's bodies women's bodies are vessels they are to be used men should be able to have sex with women however they want whenever they want however they please and so it kind of feels like those things are connected in some way. And so that's kind of, I think, what area we're going to go down next. That was going to be my question, because it sounds like right now there's been a lot of data. Go ahead. Can we just stop for a second? Because that was a lot. And for people who are listening to that, I don't know if you've been pausing and restarting and pausing and restarting, but there was a lot there. So I just want to give people a minute to take a breath,

mostly me. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead, Charlie. So it sounds like so far you've done a lot of great work on like the data collection, right? The, the finding out the, the quantity of instances and people practicing this. And I'm excited to hear that the next part seems to be kind of unpacking the behavior and the behavioral habits and the things that contribute to perpetuating the behavior. One question that came up for me or that I, or something that popped in my mind while you were sharing was, do you ever get someone asking like people who are like, still thing can't be a thing. And then you're like, it's no, it's actually a thing. And then is there a gendered response of, well, shouldn't they just be able to feel it?

so that is a very common question I wondered and so I've done a couple of guest lectures at other institutions talking about mostly about sexual violence and so I always am like here's what sexual violence is and also oh here's some stuff that we're learning in real time with our research about you know these areas that are related to what we're talking about today and one of the common questions that I get. And I don't really know if it's coming from men or women or non binary people or gender wise it's coming from, because I feel like most of the time when we're talking to our classes, it's very heavily female dominated. So I feel like when I talk about it in my classes, that is very heavily female dominated. They're like horrified eyes wide open. Like I

cannot believe this. And even the men are making faces like I am absolutely disgusted that this is a thing that people are out there doing. But I have gotten that question a couple of times of, so if this happens to somebody, how do they go? One is how do they not know this is happening to them? Right. And two, how do they prove this later on? And, you know, the second question is problematic in itself of, you know, that we're not going to get into that, but what we talked about at the top of the show, yes, it's very problematic, but the, this idea that no one's going to find out at all, like it's just going to happen. And then the person's never going to know that that happened to them is sort of ludicrous to me. And I've had to explain multiple times,

like well if it's a regardless of who it is because it's mostly men who are doing this when somebody finishes and they ejaculate do you think that that's not noticeable that the ejaculate is not held within a condom and it is literally in a person's body or do you think that whenever they get done and people are cleaning up and they're you know typically in cleanup removing condoms that that's not something that a partner is going to notice or that they can't feel it or you know it's it's very hard I think to do stealthing to people in certain positions it does happen but I do think that it's a very noticeable thing if somebody pauses in the middle and does something like what are you doing why is that happening but to say that like the act

continues and that the person has no idea never finds out seems kind of like I said ludicrous to me because there are things that happen towards the end of sexual intercourse, like ejaculation that makes that impossible not to be like, what happened? And I always explain to him. And that's why that here's 10 ways to stealth your partner came in is to really provide a lot of excuses to people who were stealthing their partners of here's what you say. So if she says, what happened to the condom you say I didn't think that we used a condom I thought we agreed not to use one so there was like an excuse or some kind of response for every possible scenario at the end of that um so it just makes it very complicated right so it's like the person will know but then there's

also a lot of discourse online in some of those online communities that are heavily male dominated that we're providing a lot of like here's how here's how you do this and here's what you say which is horrendous it makes me it gives me goosebumps makes me feel sick very very very ick yeah very i can well i was just gonna say like considering what we see being pulled down offline in terms of really good sex information and education is being censored and then this stuff's all over the place like it just it just goes into that that idea of why we're censoring and who was the censorship yeah um i just i wanted to throw out there though that um can't didn't the person feel it or can't the person feel it to me rings a little bit more along the

lines of victim blaming yeah like putting the responsibility on the person for not pausing like recognizing something paused is something changing like it's not necessarily their responsibility to go time out what are you doing yeah or what does this feel differently suddenly did you take right right and and sometimes um i i wonder if especially if like lube is being used um you might not be able to feel that the condom is gone right so i just wanted to point that that out that it rings a little bit of like well what were you wearing yeah you know it very much so does and I think that's also you know it's hard talking about topics like this and especially with people who are not you know in the atmosphere that we're in right we talk about sex we talk

about reproduction we talk about sexual assault all the time because that's part of what we do it's part of what we share with other people trying to educate them but people who are not very educated. And again, I'm not trying to take us down this rabbit hole, but society is very much so a victim blaming society. We have not shifted that kind of thought process as much as we had hoped that we would. Like I, whenever me too came around, I really had, you know, higher hopes of like, okay, we are going to make some progress then. And we're going to stop doing things like, well you were wearing lacy underwear or you were wearing this or well she was drunk at a party or i thought we were going to do away with some of that and unfortunately society has just not

progressed to the point where i was hoping that it would um because yeah i still get those questions and i mean i think that sometimes i i don't want to say that i think the intention behind the questions from students is coming from a place of intentional victim blaming i think right in their thoughts you know looking at their faces while they're like asking these questions they have this horrified look on their face i think it's coming from a place of like how is this person doing this and getting away with it unpacking right they're processing and unpacking at the same time yeah and then and then it's also to i think to your point as well is that maybe your students aren't asking from a place of like well that's done they should have just

been able to feel it and stop whatever was happening. Um, talking to our kind of culture and society right now, we're also conditioned to be like, well, what did the person do to stop this happening to themselves? Those are implicit messages that we constantly receive through entertainment news, all of the things. Yeah. So, so there's, there's that. do you collect and i don't know like i i haven't seen your study um i'm a bad bad human i haven't seen the study um there's no way i'm assuming in your study to gather if this was happening in like hookups or committed relationships or do you have any kind because i'm imagining that if you were in a partnership with someone and this happened they'd be like yeah you can get the fuck out we're done

but if it's just like a hit it and quit it kind of thing like they'll be like hey i can do whatever I want I'm ever going to see this person again so I don't know if you get that kind of information on the study we haven't asked specific questions around that but I will say that the first time around when we ask questions of is there ever any time where it's okay to remove a condom without your partner's knowledge there was some discussion in the open-ended responses from people saying well if you're in a relationship with somebody then that apparently to them was enough of a justification which to do it or to not do it to do it to remove a condom without their partner's knowledge oh we're in a relationship okay i should be able to do this then without well it comes it

comes to that piece of like um because i've seen this more and more and kind of in those toxic um pick up artist masculinity corners of the web of like marriage is a a contract of consent like that's just consent and there's no day-to-day consent um expectation yeah kind of what you're well I will say now that you've said that I am reading a book right now that um this is also kind of like leading me down this rabbit hole called men who hate women by Laura Bates. I don't know if either one of you have read it or if anyone listening has read it. Um, I will say it is a rough read because it is a constant, like I read a couple of pages and then I have to set the book down and I look at my partner and he's like, okay, what horrifying thing did you just read now

in that book. And I'm like, so, and I tell them about it, but that's kind of the consistent messaging across a lot of those online groups. So in-cells, pickup artists, men going their own way, all of it that's kind of contained in those red pill community management. I was just going to say red pill. Yep. In the red pill communities. That is kind of the sentiment is, you know, like they is either we're in a relationship so you have already once you entered into a relationship with me you have agreed that is it you've consented now to all sexual activity period or you know there a lot of the thought process and the ideology in these red pill communities is that women are vessels

our bodies belong to men we should be used however they see fit and there's a lot of talk in there about rape and sexual assault and, you know, doing whatever they please and that they don't have to gain consent from anyone. So I think this is like kind of, you know, very adjacent to a lot of the dating practices and the thought processes with these men in these red pill communities. Yes, because I think a lot of what is centered in those communities is power and control and gender expectations between mass masculine and feminine men and women specifically um but there's power there's entitlement um there's that control factor so it's not it's not unintentional miscommunication it's it's very intentional yeah yeah i've just decided to give up on the entire

human race now i'm just oh well don't read that book because it's going to make you very upset it'll make you very upset it's it's a very hard read because it's like you know it's kind of opening a door to a lot of the things I think are becoming a little too mainstream lately which is a lot of this like women going back to traditional roles and how men and women should act with each other and the very first part of the book talks a lot about the incel community and it's very hard to read through that it's like 68 pages or something like that of in cell in cell in cell which is that's a lot yeah scary I mean it's not new like we've been hearing this for decades and like I was not nearly as optimistic when me too happened like I know you thought that there'd be

more changes and I was just like here comes society doubling down on this now um it's just it's just one of those yeah it's it's just one of those things I think that sometimes when you don't work in the field because I have this all the time so you know the same as you like I talk and I'll do it either in my classes or in other spaces and the things that come out in those spaces either afterwards in private of this happened to me and this is how it happened or people just saying out loud like yeah I you know once I get married I have a student say this in class once once you get married you own that that not even her like that it was a it was it was a yeah property yeah and it was great because I didn't have to say a thing like I just watched

the entire class like like everyone turned their head everyone turned their like the exorcist like what did you just say so so for those of you who don't work in this space or and haven't like read this book or haven't gone into these reddits and please be really careful if you're not usually in these reddits reading this it can be incredibly overwhelming um but this is i don't want anyone thinking we're blowing this stuff out of proportion like we hear this all the time um so i just i just want to make sure someone's not like oh dr jen's doing research of course she's hearing that no no like we hear this stuff everywhere all the time so i just want to i just want to acknowledge it's that existence yeah it's literally all the time and now that i've started reading that book

i feel like i'm picking up now in more like pop culture and stuff some of these kinds of, um, like ideology that men have subscribed to. And it's, it's been very eye opening, but also a little disturbing. Um, and yes, for anyone that's listening, I would not recommend that your first time on Reddit, you go searching for things like selfing or red pill communities. You're going to be very upset, uh, by the things that you find on there. Um, but I I think Reddit has actually shown me a lot of things that are very interesting about these different topics. Like with stealthing, we're hoping to publish this paper sometime soon, but some of my students

and I, we analyze comments on a Reddit post that asked about, is stealthing as bad as lying about taking birth control? And the discourse on there was very interesting. It was a lot of like, legally, here's what you can and what you shouldn't do, but morally and ethically, here's what it is. So there was a lot of conversation on this particular post about how legally you can't really prove either one of those, which, okay. Yep. Just all right with that. I just like, um, and then a lot of discourse about what the potential outcomes were going to be. And a lot of it was like, you know, you could give someone an STI, there could be an unintended pregnancy, um, with either one of those.

But then there was a couple of mentions in there about fatherhood, forced fatherhood. And I thought that was really interesting that it was forced fatherhood, but not forced parenting for both genders because that is what happens but a lot of the like conversation on there was some people would say yes those two things should be lumped together they're both bad they are both equivalent and other people were like nope they're not really the same things at all whatsoever because someone could just absentmindedly forget to take their birth control pill, but stealthing is a very intentional act on itself. That's something that I wanted to get into next. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say Dr. C looked like she was going to like,

yeah, I'm I just, because the difference in that, this, the difference in this idea of forcing someone into fatherhood versus forcing someone into pregnancy, not even motherhood and not even like parenthood forcing someone into pregnancy and in this country right now that could lead to having to carry a child to term because the state you're in it's it's not feasible for you to or illegal for you to get an abortion forced pregnancy is is it's a human rights violation yeah the fact that we are comparing forced fatherhood yeah sorry quotes let's sort of there's always air quotes here um in the same sentence as a human rights violation of forced pregnancy like and i know someone's going to come at me and be like well just because

they got pregnant doesn't mean they have to keep the baby it's not really a forced pregnancy that was not true right now in the united states especially depending on where you live yeah yeah just just the difference between those two things just human rights violation force i think that's a good point to bring up and i actually had i had done a short interview with um a reporter for kaiser health and npr for science friday a couple of years ago we were talking about the overturning of roe v wade and how stealthing and um condom use resistance tactics kind of play a role in that. And I'm saying that the consequences are dire at this point. They're very severe. So we're not just talking about like, oh, you know, somebody can just go and get an

abortion and it'll be totally fine. We're looking at like a lot of legal issues now, right? People crossing state lines and ordering abortion pills online, getting them prescribed and like the repercussions of that for both parties carrying a pregnancy to term. But what happens if something goes wrong and you have a complication um yeah it's just it's leading to a lot of different issues and of course that was nothing that got really brought up in this particular post the only thing that did got got brought up that i thought was very interesting and i i don't know can't say for certain you know research wise if this is an exact correlation between these two things but there was a lot of talk in there about lying about getting a vasectomy and i thought

that's really interesting because that's not really something that we were concerned or talking about before Roe got overturned and now that's a comparison that we're making is is stealthing as bad as lying about birth control and lying about having a vasectomy and it's very it's very interesting conversation which also takes the focus off what happens to the woman if she gets pregnant when she didn't want to like all those conversations oh was it about is it worse to do stealthing or worse, you're still possibly winding up with a woman or a man who's possibly contracting an STI, depending on the genders involved. Yeah, you're putting other people's health at risk. Right. And we had done an episode a few, speaking of things that pissed me off,

we did an episode about maternal mortality in this country and how getting pregnant can actually be a death sentence. But yeah, let's go back and figure out which is the worst lie. That to me just takes the focus off of the impact of the lie. The fact that we're trying to rank lies is amusing but not at the same time well and i want to point out to dr jen's point a little bit earlier is that pill taking the pill you can absent-mindedly forget because you've got things going on or you're overly stressed or something whereas as you pointed out stealthing is intentional like you physically have to make you have to make the decision and then you have to physically execute it. So there's a little bit of premeditation, right? Cause you're like, all right,

I'll put it on at the beginning so that they see me put it on and we'll get going. And in the heat of the moment, I'll figure out the right time and then I'm going to gaslight them. So this leads into something that I was particularly looking forward to unzipping is that media and cultural attitude around forgetting either forgetting to take the pill or or stopping taking the pill um and the implications there forced fatherhood and stealthing and how differently those things those two instances are talked about broadly in in society and i think that that post and the comments on that post reflect that that implicit messaging of like when it when the woman is tasked with contraception she is wholly responsible

and if she right exactly she's trying to track them but there doesn't seem to be that attitude around stealthing because we give i think sorry i'm i'm just so angry i know i feel like i'm steamrolling through this conversation i'm not giving dr sue time to like sit and steam no i well because the first thing that came up is no wonder we have a male loneliness epidemic if this is how how a lot of men are thinking um it just it it's it's reminding me a lot of like i hate to even say this phrase well boys will be boys like we're we're okay with them getting away with this behavior when when we're talking about violation when we're talking about health risk when we're talking about premeditation you know the thing to keep in mind about both the pill and the external

condom is they're not 100 effective and and i've seen where women will get pregnant and they're like i don't understand i took it every day i'm like it's it's still it's still not 100 effective but we still blame her right you know and maybe she forgot to take a pill or maybe she got sick and she threw it up and forgot that it was going to be ineffective because it wasn't in it didn't have time to get absorbed but this whole like well you did it you put yourself in the situation where it's like oh men are doing these things where you know it's a violation it just reminded me of that boys will be boys and that they're just held to this much easier simpler standard i i also want to like i know i'm sitting there thinking about the men who would be just as

incensed as i am right now so we do want to make sure that we're acknowledging that we're talking about a specific part of the population but but it's happening and the fact is is that the the the change of the story between what you're finding dr jen about this is happening and this is how they rationalize it and all the background research you've done to get ready for this and then how it's being promoted in the mass media like the it's it's just not reflecting what we know is happening it's really not and i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of research that's been done on contraception, uh, tampering and reproductive coercion. So there's already a lot of stuff out there about that, about, you know, tampering with condoms or tampering with

birth control, but it feels like it does feel very gendered sometimes, you know, just like how there's plenty of names for women, like we're whores and sluts and whatever it's be bachelors. um so i feel like there's always some kind of gendered blame on women um and whenever men do stuff like that it sort of just gets swept under the rug a little bit um like i don't know why but this is the very first thing that came to my mind is thinking about you know things in the media the um the actor from vampire diaries and his wife um i forget what his name is but i know his wife is nikki reed and she was we were talking about twilight earlier before we got started but she's in twilight um how he openly said in the media several several years ago like i was ready

to have a kid so i threw away nikki's birth control so she would get pregnant without i'm sorry she stayed yep she stayed they're still together yeah okay someone else is gonna have to say something about my brain while her brain pops a little so it's like stuff like that gets said and it's just was sort of swept under the rug but then you know there's just such she poked or she put holes in his condom so right let's flip this i wanted to have a baby he wasn't ready i threw away my birth control oh it would be the amount of attention that would have gotten oh yeah and how she would have been painted it would have been baby trapper it would have been like i can't believe she did

this that he's now a victim in his marriage yep but it happens to her and it felt like it just sort of got swept under the rug right yeah i i have a friend of mine who's um whose brother was going through a divorce and she was venting to me one time that she was having this conversation like talking with their mom and um he wasn't there but they uh they had a couple of kids a couple three kids and um the first one was was not planned and the way that her brother was talking about that pregnancy was like well you know she told me she was on the pill blah blah blah and my and she was struggling to like go up against her mom and her brother because she was just like you had a choice you didn't have to come inside of her yep like that's the thing

there she didn't get pregnant on her own could have worn a condom right yeah all of those things so so it was I I just can I remember feeling her just like I don't know what to say Charlie like how do I get this through to them but then that that also points to how what you were saying dr sue is the boys will be boys um attitude in society is that there is always room for for the men to be victims air quote in these situations when they've made very explicit decisions for themselves to come inside her to be okay not using a condom assuming that the pill is always gonna work or or whatever or that she'll take care of it right right that she'll take care of it yeah yeah yeah grr i know fucking grr i feel like i came on i just

got y'all so amped up do you have anything else you want to share or piss me off with before i mean there's a lot of things i can say i think we may have to have you back for second part of dr jen pisses off dr sue dr sue really angry and watch charlie's just in the middle watching the tennis rally i don't i honestly don't know why i'm not surprised i mean we like i said like we do this all the time we hear this all the time like the things my male students have said in class and and they keep saying it even though like like you said like the majority of higher education right now is female and and usually the men are outnumbered in my class and that doesn't stop

them because they they honestly feel that they're entitled to think this way and and you're entitled to your own beliefs you're also entitled to the consequences of them um so i i don't know why i'm i know why i'm so angry anyway any last thoughts before we start wrapping this up i mean no last thoughts for me i i have uh i think we've covered like quite a bit of horrific things um maybe next time we can talk about something fun um i don't know what right fun ways to put on a condom fun ways to put on a condom there we go oh my gosh such fun things how to make yeah like how to make that kind of make it sexy in rage mode right now too having read this book and we're we're doing another study right now also looking at some

reddit posts um related to like red pill communities about dating practices and that also was my research team we have a story about that we we decide to study pleasure we're like screw this we're going somewhere different honestly maybe that's what i should have done i will say though that this hasn't been a widely studied topic so it feels like we're embarking on something very new research wise, but something that apparently is very prevalent in these online male dominated communities, um, about it's like very emotional and psychological abuse is kind of where we're going. And some of them that's, I wanted to sort of wrap up with that as, um, is the emotional and psychological impact on, um, on the victims on those who have been through

this is that that you you will feel betrayed, there is likely a level of trauma that will inform fear. But there are ways to help work through that and find, find your journey back to pleasure and desire afterwards. But those those are really very, very real impacts. And I think the other thing that is disturbing, and part of what we're finding as far as like, the book that you're reading dr jen is that the prevalence of these online communities and um and personalities is making its way into mainstream like it's constantly reported on and constantly highlighted and constantly and not for the best reasons you know i'm thinking of um the fucker that got to come back to the united states because of of things um but you don't say certain names

being yeah being arrested for for trafficking and all of those things and how widely he's he's reported on and photographed and so those are the pervasive ways that these things are normalized in our society and so listeners just being able to be aware of that and and finding more and more language and if you do decide to go to some of these toxic online communities make sure you have a lifeline out because because it can be very um consuming and and you know small doses if if it's something that you want to dive into to find better language around some of the things i tell my my students will sometimes start doing some rabbit hole digging after the things that come up in class and i always tell them and i know it sounds really

stupid set a timer set a 10-15 minute timer and when that timer is up you must get out of whatever rabbit hole you are in and you must you know go outside touch the ground see the sky do pet your cat or dog like but to set a timer because otherwise it is very easy to get so lost that's why we call them rabbit holes um so yeah really simple if you want to start looking at this and if you're a parent of a kid who's getting to that age where they may be getting online without you knowing what they're doing it's probably not the worst thing in the world to know what's out there but setting a timer is really good for your sanity and also putting some parental controls on some of that content because um you know laura bait says it very well in that book that's how it's all

happening is young men are getting lured into these communities because they have ants if quote unquote air quotes again answers about different things and the ideology that's being pushed on these communities really provides an answer for pretty much any of their problems yep and how it's not they're they're not the problem right not the problem it's not their fault there's always the women right the women it's and women it's the minorities it's right yeah and i wonder how different our attitudes would be towards these communities and their influence on, um, on the younger generations. If we started labeling, labeling it as grooming. Yes. These communities groom. Yep. So, or hate speech. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we will, this was a, this was a heavy,

a heavy zipper to unzip. Um, but I'm so glad that we were able to do that. Dr. Jen, thank you so so much for all of this and we can't wait to have you back for something a little lighter a little fun how to make condom negotiation fun yeah yeah we should we should talk about fun things next time but i do appreciate both of you having me on absolutely um and we will put some some links to resources because we did you know we we did highlight that this is this is sexual assault. And there might be there might be things that surface for you that you you don't know where to go to help process and find support. So we'll absolutely put those links in our episode description. And with that, I want to thank you all for joining us on this episode of unzipping

taboos. We really hope today's episode will spark some new thoughts will open up conversations worth having. And remember that your curiosity is a key to breaking down many of these barriers and taboos and embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships. So if you enjoyed the show, which feels like a weird phrase to say today, if you found today's show fascinating, engaging, all of those adjectives, please subscribe, leave a review and 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, you want us to unzip, please reach out to us via the link in the episode description. Again, a huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supporting Unzipping Taboos.

Don't forget that you can get 20% off your order with the code UNZIPPING20. We want to give a very special shout out to Allie O'Brien for her incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Allie. Thank you again, Dr. Jen. And until next time, please keep those conversations going. Keep unzipping those taboos. And everyone, take care.