Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - The Circles of Sexuality: More than just sex!

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

In this episode of "Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex with Dr. Sue & Charlie," we explore the Circles of Sexuality, a framework that helps break down the many layers of human sexuality. Dr. Sue and Charlie talk about each of the five circles—sensuality, intimacy, sexual identity, sexual health and reproduction, and sexualization—discussing how they intersect and influence our overall understanding of sex and relationships. We dive into how these circles impact everything from body image and trust, to communication and pleasure, while also tackling some common misconceptions. Dr. Sue shares her insights, and Charlie offers relatable examples to make the concepts easier  to understand and apply to everyday life. Join us for a deeper look at the complexity of sexuality and how understanding and  embracing the circles can lead to a healthier, more informed relationship with yourself and others. If you have a topic or question for us please submit your ideas here:  Show suggestions Curious about the Circles of Sexuality - check it out here: Circles of Sexuality A huge thanks to Allie O’Brien for our theme music.

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. Together, we dive into the topics around sex and sexuality that you're curious about, but maybe too shy to talk about. No judgment here, just real talk. So zip down and let's get candid. Today, we're going to talk about the five circles of sexuality. But before we dive into that, I want to introduce my co-host here, Dr. Sue.

Hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie. You want to share a little bit about your background with our listeners? Yeah, I think a lot of it's going to come out in the episode. but essentially I'm a sex educator. I work primarily in academia, but I also do a lot of work in community settings, working across the lifespan. I work with doctors and social workers and administrators, and so just a lot of education all over the place. And for those of you who don't know Charlie's background, this is Charlie, our open-minded guide to the intimate and intriguing

world of sex relationships and just about everything in between. Do you want to tell us a little bit more than just that? Sure. Dr. Sue and I have been close friends for years, we find that we talk about anything and everything together. No, nothing is too taboo for us to talk about. And I am also someone who has just historically enjoyed challenging taboos and what's expected of me as a woman in society and how I'm but how I am, air quotes supposed to act. So through our conversations, we felt like this was something that maybe several more people would want to be privy to. So that's, that's how we got here. So today, Dr. Sue, the five circles of sexuality. I'm excited because really, this is just me usurping another episode about education.

I love it. Which has been my goal since day one. Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that I want to just kind of dive right into is, and that we didn't get to cover in our episode around the, you know, the state of sex ed in the US is really what the tenor and what sex ed is centered around these days, which is does that disease, death, disease, disaster and dysfunction? Yes, there it is. You want to tell us a little bit about that? yeah and i don't i mean i could go into the history lesson i don't think all that many people would be as interested in it as i am but if you are send us a show a topic suggestion for the show i'm happy to talk about that but a lot of really what happened was because of hiv maids

so they were trying to pull sex out of the schools in the 80s and then hiv aids comes around and we have hundreds of thousands of people dying from a disease that's could be transmitted through sex and so they had to keep the education in those schools well i say that not even every state agrees with that but what happened was it really became focused on disease and disease prevention and the health consequences like the unintended pregnancies and i'm sure we've seen that movie where the health teacher is talking about sex and they're like you're gonna die it became very much about death and disease but also then when we were having conversations in this in in the popular media not now like we see with social media but back in like

the 80s 90s in the early 2000s when we were talking about it openly we were often talking about it from a dysfunction perspective most of us can remember when they were advertising um viagra and drugs like that like that was the first conversation some folks were having about sex was these these these commercials about dysfunction and so a lot of when we do talk about sex in a formal setting and i wouldn't even say in a school setting i see this also in some of the places i go into to do to do presentations there it's really this focus on the death and disease and the dysfunction and that's not fun it's just not fun and and so we lose so much when we just focus on that yeah and then the other thing that uh that we were talking about as we

were talking about this topic for this show for this episode was also kind of a how because of the current state of sex ed what you find as an educator when you introduce this concept of the five circles of sexuality is some of just the foundational knowledge is missing you know as as you put it I'm going to steal your phrase but you know how the plumbing works and so in order to get to this concept of the five circles kind of the backtracking you have to do to lay the foundation to introduce the concept what's what's that like what's your experience been with that it's incredibly it's incredibly frustrating but let me do a quick dive for those of you who aren't familiar, the circles of sexuality, they're not mine. I absolutely stole them from advocates for

youth. If you Google circles of sexuality, you will find them. They're this, it's this holistic way of looking at sex and sexuality and not just focusing on the behavior of sex. And whenever I talk to people, really, if I'm going to be talking to you about sex for more than an hour in any given training, we're going to cover this, even if it's only for 10 minutes, because I need people to stop thinking about sex and sexuality as just being about the behavior of sex because there's so much more to it we are sexual creatures from the day we're born i mean we are gendered from the minute we're born like we are learning about all these things that go into who we are as sexual creatures we we learn about gender roles we learn about what feels good we learn about what we

shouldn't do we learn all of this and so we need to start having these much broader conversations and what's interesting is that when I tell people because people sometimes are a little afraid to bring me into their venue um for events because they don't really they don't really know what I'm going to talk about and in their defense I don't always want to talk about but I feel like sometimes you're like oh you're going to talk about sex I'm like no no like I guess but I'm also going to be talking about like your body parts and how they work and I know that when I work with aging populations we don't talk to them about how their bodies change as they age so I have to talk to them about that too how what relationships look like what we may be looking

for in relationships that's what all of this is it's and that's what this show is it's not just like here's how to have sex it's all of these things and and I used to joke that at least we were doing the plumbing. So I could start from there. But we're not even really talking about anatomy and physiology anymore with folks. So a lot of times I'm getting people walking into either my classroom or training, who have nothing except what they've kind of learned from media and their friends and their relationships. That's, that's a lot of that's a lot of groundwork to put in to get to the, the concept. So, um, with that background, I do want to dive into this concept of the five circles. Um, I have it pulled up here and it's, you know, it is quite fascinating

because it is, I think one of the things that you run into is because the word sex is in your title in your, you know, in the classes that you teach so many of us in the, in the general public, you know, the general public, when we hear sex, many of us, if not all of us immediately think of the act of, right. And so what this concept really, I think helps with is broadening that perspective of sex and sexuality because of what it encompasses. There are so many things that go into our motivation to get to the act of that are informed by values, different kinds of values, your individual values, values you were raised around with your family, anything if you grew up in a religious or spiritual setting, the values surrounding that,

um, laws as we're seeing in, in this year of 2024. Um, you know, so all of those things that either explicitly inform our attitudes, um, and how we interact and engage with our own self, and then how we manifest that in our interactions with other people. So, um, would you like to walk us through one, one of the circles or introduce all five. How, how would, how would you like to approach this? Yeah. So it's interesting. I want to skip. So one is sexual health and reproduction, and that's just body parts, how they work. And again, not something necessarily teaching everybody. I like to skip over that. Not sorry. I'm going to skip over that for now. I don't like to skip over that. Sexual identity is one of those two. And a lot of people automatically

assume I'm talking about sexual orientation. And I actually have to fight with my students quite a bit to get them to change their language while they're in my space. When I use the term sexuality in my classroom, and my poor students just went through this lecture last week, I mean it as this holistic concept. And for so many people, even in the popular press, they talk about sexuality as your sexual orientation. But there's so much more to it than that but people usually seem when I talk about sexual identity it's like oh she's talking about sexual orientation again or like oh she's talking about trans stuff which usually granted I'm talking about those but it's not just about that it's also about gender roles so if you

identify as male what did that teach you about your body how you feel about your body how you think you're supposed to act towards other people how you feel like you're supposed to have your needs met same thing for people who identify as other genders so that's the sexual identity one I don't know if you want to pop in any thoughts I want to get to my favorite well um I mean that that seems you know pretty pretty obvious once you see this and once you kind of start to engage with this concept is that how you identify does inform your interactions your act can inform your attitudes on a certain level because then you had the layers right that we talked about at the beginning of

this concept piece um so it just it seems so like well of course once you once you start to think about it so um so we talked about this when we talked about the body count episode that there's a different expectation for how many people you've been sexually involved with same culture simply based off your gender so yeah and and that moment that you're having right now of like well yeah of course that makes sense that's what most people have when when they start to see this and hear this like that it's it's about all of these things so congratulations you're normal today Thank you. But I think that also, you know, having this moment is also why we're doing this, this podcast, because it is one of those things, you know, many of you have heard me talk about social conditioning. And that's what that this is a piece of that. And how how it encourages you or discourages you to interact with your sex and sexuality. where shall we go next my favorite okay let's do it actually let's see that laugh I've been making

I've been making eyes at her the whole time about let's go backwards so I can spend the most time on my favorite so the one that's really important to talk about and the one I really just don't enjoy talking about is sexualization and that's that's about manipulation and control and what's really interesting with my students is that when I start introducing this concept they're like oh rape rape we're talking about rape we're talking about sexual harassment we're talking about sexual assault i'm like yes and if using who you are and your sexuality to manipulate people also includes flirting so if you are flirting not just like flirting for fun but like flirting your way out of a ticket or into a club or into a free drink like that is a method of manipulation and tying

it back to our gender we're taught that some genders that's acceptable behavior the other thing and I'm hearing about this more and more from folks when I do live events this idea that partners are withholding sex until they do something so if you don't do x y and z we're not having sex and that's that's manipulation and that's control and that's also not always a sign of a healthy relationship. So it is, it is one of those things that I think sometimes you just assume that manipulation is always like the sexual assault and rape and incest and harassment. But it is also the other ways that we use these things in our in our relationships. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And it is, again, that social conditioning piece, right? What kind of

jokes are okay. And, you know, there, there are arguments out there that there are jokes about rape that are broadly accepted in society. And that's all, you know, this sexualization piece of how society and individuals, again, interact with sexuality. So wish we could like, stop and ask people what they're thinking. But I'm curious, when Charlie said making jokes about rape, I'm curious what came to people's heads. because what comes to my mind are the jokes that we make about prison rape because that is one of the things that we are still telling jokes about but it is that is not okay so i i if you're listening i want to share what you were thinking please feel free to but

i'm curious like because when you say making jokes about rape i feel like sometimes we we forget that that also includes male and male violence because that is just such an acceptable part of the jokes that we tell these days, or some people tell these days. Right, right. And I think that there has been a little bit of a change in the acceptability of it, but a little bit, a little bit as progress, but there could, you know, there could be more. If you could only see the face I was making. Yeah. All right. So where do we go to next on our journey? So one of the circles is called intimacy and this is this is really interesting because this is when I talk about this this is where I start talking about we don't always have to have all of our needs met by our

partner and I think that's one of the things we're starting to open our eyes to now I think that a lot of folks who were brainwashed by romance novels and rom-coms it was always about like this partner who is going to be our everything and what we're realizing now is that our friends play really important roles in our lives even if we have romantic relationships our family bonds if those are strong our friendship bonds will often give us a route to an emotional closeness and an emotional vulnerability that we may not always share with our sexual partners and it's this idea of like being around people who care about us and this is this is why i think it's so important we're talking about this. If I'm young and I don't know any of this and I just

feel really disconnected, sex may be a way that I can feel connected and fill this need when really I may just want to have someone I can emotionally feel close to. And I didn't necessarily, I mean, the physical component may be great, but that may not have been necessary to fill the void that I felt needed to be filled. And so that's why I think it's really important that we're talking about all the relationships in our lives and how they fill all of these needs for us. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to always be our sexual partner. I think it's unrealistic to assume our sexual partner is going to be our everything. I think that's a lot of pressure on our relationships. Like who can live up to that? And so I think that when we realize that we can get some of this

caring for other people, the sharing with other people, that we can do this with our friends, it makes our lives feel more fulfilled and it makes us feel a little bit more balanced yeah absolutely I was talking with a friend of mine who had that aha moment you know she was she was kind of down that she you know she was a certain age not old by any means like mid-30s and didn't have a you know she's someone who wanted has wanted to get married and kind of fill that, that story for herself. And then she just had this moment where she was like, Oh, wait a minute. I get to travel with people that I love and make memories with people that I love. So it really changed her attitude about what she was looking for in a partner that she would

consider marrying in the future. And I think it put her in a healthier mind space as well to take that pressure off of herself to find a a life partner a husband um to fulfill all of those you know that in all of the five circles for herself um but especially that intimacy piece because intimacy doesn't always have to be tied to romance or sex yeah it was interesting i know we're gonna i hope we're gonna do an episode at one point about how covid changed our relationships with people and our relationships with ourselves but we were watching how different genders were really reacting differently to some of the isolation and they didn't realize how important some of those roles were i mean some folks were literally

in quarantine with their with their significant others but they were still missing pieces it was the first time they really had to identify it they didn't always know how to fill it because they couldn't go out and like hang out and do the things they normally did so I think we're becoming a lot more aware and I know some folks like oh you're making it harder on a potential partner I think we're making it easier right if I don't make you be my everything that makes your life way easier yeah and I think it I think it's going to strengthen a lot of relationships when we start looking at what each one gives us as part of a bigger whole instead of each one having to be the whole and and making kind of your relationship with yourself richer right because

to to that story that pressure gets released to have someone tick every single box that you think a person a person a romantic person should fulfill well if it's i want to travel and make memories with someone i love you have family hopefully i'm not gonna make an assumption but some people have family that they can do that with you have friends you can do that with you could you could you know go with a travel group so it just it really I think broadens and and as you said kind of eases the burden on on relationships to be all things and it was it was interesting I was working with a group of widows widowers widowers men widowers sorry folks yeah just had a brain fart there I was working with a group of widowers and they all happened to be

over the age of 65 so they were all a little bit on the older side and they were trying to figure out how to exist as a single which when you've been married for 20 30 40 years was this is a huge challenge and so I was because I do talk to almost every group I ever talked to about the circles we were talking about this intimacy piece and how it's about this this ability to feel close to someone else and someone very shy and I think he kind of meant it as a joke but he kind of did and he goes does my dog count I was like sort of I mean not I mean your dog can't talk back but as he was going through this healing this grieving his dog really did read his emotions and he had to care for his dog and that that in a lot of ways got him out of bed sometimes like I have to get

up and I have to take the dog out and I have to feed the dog and and I'm not I'm not saying that pets can replace what humans give us though sometimes I think it's easier to get some of that that unconditional love from pets um but we're seeing this more and more like understanding the roles that animals bring into our lives and in feeling like someone cares about us and we can care for someone else that that that desire to be important to someone else and for someone to be important to us it's one of those ways it really got highlighted for me and you know I said yes like having the dog definitely was helping him and helping his his mental well-being and it was the first step for him getting back to trying to reform connections but I think it's really

important that we talk about all the different ways and I'm again I'm not saying pets solve everything but they sure help a lot they do they do all right next on the journey Sue where are we headed they're gonna go to my face it's so funny because I feel like one day I was talking in class and I kept saying and my next one's my favorite and I think at one point they're like you keep saying that this one's really my favorite because I think this is the one that has a lot of the fun stuff so the the technical term for this circle is its sensuality so it's it's kind of being aware of our own body and what we like about other people's bodies and this is something we don't talk about in schools 99 of them we don't i'm sure there's that one sex educator who's kicking

ass and doing all this stuff um did anyone if you're okay sharing the look on your face like what's coming up did anyone ever talk to you in a formal educational way about fantasy no absolutely not yeah and it's it's one of those ways that we can really start to think about like what do I like what do I like what I don't like but what what might turn me on what might not turn me on I I joke that it's like the safest form of sex because no one's getting pregnant but if that's your fantasy like I don't want to yuck your yum um but it's it's a great way of being able to to get into your head and figure out what you like and you don't like so it includes things like fantasy um I'm gonna save my favorite favorite I think I've now said that eight times

It includes the impact of body image. And I think this is one of those things that we casually, oh yeah, body image. Body image can have such a huge impact on how we experience sex and how we think other people are experiencing it with us. So if we're really uncomfortable in our body, and we don't want people looking at a bruise or a scar or what we think is an ugly part of our body, and the whole time we're fooling around with someone, we're just thinking like, oh, don't look there, don't look there, don't touch there, don't look there. That's really hard to get turned on. And so we may be going through the motions of being intimate with someone, but we're not really able to sit back and enjoy it. and this is for I and I think this is for everyone because what I was just about to say when I talk about body image is a lot of people like oh we're talking about women it's not just women people of all genders I do a lot of work with men people of all genders really feel this pressure to look a certain way when they're naked and so if they're super uncomfortable that's gonna make the sex

probably less enjoyable and to bring it full circle do it thank you to bring it full circle if I identify as female and so I have this cultural expectation of what it means to be female and I have this cultural expectation of what a sexy woman looks like I may engage in certain behaviors for validation to make me feel like people want me and I'm sexy so you can kind of see how all these things start to become overlapping yeah well and to add on to that body image piece as well like if you're if you're starting to talk to somebody or date somebody and you as you're finding out about them you know maybe they um they are crossfitters and so you might have an assumption of the type of body that they're attracted to um but that may not be true

but it's it's a safe assumption to make right if they're around it all the time then they must enjoy it they must enjoy looking at it they must want to engage with it so why why are they engaging with me. And it's that piece that you were talking about of like being in your head and not being fully present for something, um, with a partner that is, is likely very much happy that you're in front of them and with them and being intimate with them. Yeah. We see this sometimes with prostate cancer, sorry, not prostate cancer survivors, though. I've worked with them too, and they have definite challenges in their healing, but with breast cancer survivors, especially if they've had surgery,

there's a lot of like if they're already partnered my partner's not going to find me attractive anymore and if they're not partnered it's i'm never going to find someone and i understand where that fear is coming from but becomes it can sometimes become overwhelming and that can really impact the decisions they're making and how they're portraying themselves and who they're letting into their lives and it's just it really just has this ripple effect yeah yeah absolutely so you want to get to your favorite it's actually not so she's looking at the sheet i sent her it's actually not on the sheet but i'm going to talk about skin hunger because i think that's really important it's on my sheet skin hunger that's not my favorite

it's not no there's another one that's the one you wanted to talk about i do i do want to talk about all right so this is not her favorite favorite but it's one that she's wanted to talk about and it's one i find myself talking about more and more and more and it was started before covid but it definitely amped up during covid and so skin hunger is this desire that most of us have to be touched and not in like a sex way i mean yes in a sex way but but just to have human contact one way right it's one way right and and it's just this desire that most of us want to have human contact and when we're not having that filled and we see this in people who are isolated um we see this sometimes in folks who are in assisted living facilities and

don't have a partner and aren't getting a lot of touch um we see this with people who are going through quarantine and isolation and they didn't have touch it's it's not like you wake up one day and you're like oh I must feed my skin hunger there is something missing in my life nobody thinks that I don't think that way and I know my hand is so hungry to hold another hand yeah we don't think about that and so we we may go out and engage in behaviors to try to fill this need when that's not how we necessarily need to build sometimes we just want someone to like put a hand on our shoulder or like hold our hands or um I was working with uh I was working with a person at an assisted living facility where this woman was she kept wanting to go to the doctor claiming

that things were not okay and i'm sure some of those were valid but after we were discussing it for a while we realized that we thought it was because she just wanted that human contact because when you go to the doctor there's a lot of touch um and so we really try to work and find ways that we could kind of build some of that contact in that didn't require going to the doctor and but it's it's not something we talk about I no one in my formal education ever talked to me about skin hunger I know the first time I heard the term was last week yeah with you but it's like it's this aha moment for most that's another one yeah yeah but I'm like skin hunger I used to work with this group of social workers in DC in Washington DC and the first time I mentioned

it it was like I had to stop because they're all like that explains some of their their behavior that they were seeing it wasn't necessarily a desire to have sex it was desire to be physically close to another human being so I think that's really important and and again I think it ties into all those other circles and if we were in class we do a whole exercise about how that works but we're not doing that that's the joy no homework well yeah I gave him homework last time but anyway my favorite your favorite my absolute favorite is a concept of pleasure and i think it's my favorite because it's why a lot of people decide to engage in sexual behavior and i know some people are like are there other reasons and there are there's a ton of reasons

why people decide to engage in sex like boredom validation revenge but i think i think you're absolutely right it's so often social conditioning key buzzword of this episode um is is that sex is synonymous with pleasure and we know it's not for so many people yeah for so many people for so many people but the messaging out there in the movies in magazines in tv shows and whatever you're watching it is always this like oh you know an amazing experience that brings these two people closer together and it's the best and there's fireworks and whatever but and we all know that's not true it's not it's not every time some people don't have that experience ever yeah right yeah and and it's interesting because I find I talk a lot about pleasure because it's fun

and because I feel like simply by talking about pleasure I'm starting to dismantle that death disease disaster dysfunction mentality I'm currently on a research team we're actually going to be launching a study on pleasure so when we do I'll try to tie it and tag the podcast and we're trying to get we're trying to get people to talk about their experiences with pleasure because we don't study it and we don't study it for a lot of reasons and i don't want to get into the politics of funding and all that fun stuff um but what's really interesting is that so i do this activity i'm trying to figure out how to do this there's no whiteboard i can't point at anything i do this activity i did this at a conference when when i was talking about some

lesson plans but so i was working with sexuality educators and it's called a pleasure rep web so I put the word pleasure on the board and it was like early in the morning it was like eight o'clock in the morning which for me is early and I was like okay folks like and I didn't give them guidelines of like don't say sex I just said I really I want you to kind of broaden your mind just think what already your day has brought you pleasure would you like to give the guess at eight in the morning, but had brought people pleasure? Coffee. There we go. No brainer. But then for other people, because we were away at a conference, it was, I had a chance to talk to my kid this morning, or I got up and I went for a walk or I I'm really excited

about like coming of course to this session. No, but they were really excited about what the conference was bringing them and just being around people who do the work that we do. They were, they were so energized from just just being there and so we go through this and it's all these things that bring pleasure and eventually someone said something sucks because we were like okay like if we extend this out like what in general will you turn to nobody ever talked to me about pleasure when I was in high school and and I think about the high school kids now like they want to fill that need we want to do things that feel good I mean of course we want to do things that feel good but if we could talk to to people of all ages about what can you do that feel

good that may be sexual and maybe that's a great way of coming up with new new things you want to try but also how else do we get pleasure for some people it's that coffee is very powerful for pleasure I found I am one of those people um I had one woman who is a different training I had woman who's like when I come home and like my husband has taken care of some of the tasks in the home and I can just come down come and sit down and we can just like talk about our day and I don't have to worry about like cleaning house or taking care of kids she's like that it's just it's such a deep meaningful intimate moment that just brings her pleasure and so I think if we can start talking about pleasure and it's all over the place all the time how can we get more pleasure in

our lives, maybe through sex, maybe through sexual behavior, maybe not. But I think it's really important that we're using that word. I just, I think it's a word I don't hear unless I'm saying it. So that's everybody's homework. I feel like now I'm starting to give people homework. Say pleasure on a very random basis. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's very important because, you know, so much of what we've talked about in some of our episodes is giving the language around the the the topic and you know not just the act of sex but especially in this concept of these circles of sexuality if we can talk about pleasure and that it is not just the act of sex it is talking with your best friend brings you pleasure you know it is all the things

that you know bring you pleasure or some people might equate it with joy or what have you but if you can start to again I think you put this perfectly when we were talking about this topic for this episode is broadening the perspective of sexuality because it is it is all of these things it is how you interact with different sexual identities it is how you interact with your own identity is what you understand of your intimacy needs and that it's not always tied to a romantic partner or doesn't have to be tied to a romantic partner and that pleasure goes beyond the act of sex yeah and normalizing that as being okay yeah because and I know we've already done our censorship episode and I'm sure we're going to do another one in the future probably but there

have been times where I have worked with an education director and where I'm going somewhere or I'm working with marketing when I'm doing a live event and I'll give them options for a title and believe it or not there are times when I've had pleasure in the title and they've asked me to change it it's like what is so terrifying about pleasure and one of them was at a bar so it's like like if we can't talk about pleasure in a bar like what what's what's going on yeah what assumptions are you making what is happening here yeah yeah so yeah so it's everybody's homework if you're listening to this your homework is to use pleasure as much as possible that word in the next 24 hours tag us if you're doing it on social media if you're using the word pleasure

on social media yeah thank you for clarifying you're welcome it is unzipping taboos um well dr sue thank you i think that was you know that was fascinating uh to dive into um and i think we'll probably link or maybe provide the graphic of the circles of sexuality um i think that would be quite interesting for our listeners yeah and if there's something you want us to i know you're about to take us out and i'm always jumping in on you but if there's something that came up today where you're like i don't know that term or why do we do that or please talk more about that please submit a suggestion for a show we're happy to answer we're happy to talk about and answer questions you folks have instead of just talking about the things that fascinate us yeah yeah and

and to um to add on to that it's not just if you just want to know more about something and it you know you're like i don't know if it's an episode worthy topic submit it anyway because we we want to have conversations with you. And it may not be an episode topic, but it is a way we want to engage with you. We don't want you to feel like you're just listening to this and having to process it on your own. If you want clarification, please reach out to us. So, um, thank you everyone for joining us today on unzipping taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. we hope today's episode about the five circles uh sparked new thoughts and opened up dialogues worth having remember your curiosity is the key to breaking down barriers and embracing a healthier

understanding of sex and relationships so if you enjoyed today's show don't forget to subscribe leave a review and share it with someone who might need to hear this and as we were just saying if you have a topic or question you want us to dive into reach out to us via the link in the episode episode description. And until next time, keep the conversation going, keep unzipping those taboos and take care of everyone.