Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Unzipping Taboos: 7 Sex Questions You’re Too Embarrassed to Ask

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

What are the questions about sex you’ve always wanted to ask but felt too awkward to say out loud? In this open and insightful episode, we take on seven of the most common—and most avoided—sex questions, inspired by this Buzzfeed article featuring Dr. Sue herself. Using our signature mix of expertise, humor, and candor, we shed light on topics many are too shy to talk about. The questions we talk about are:  “What comes out when I squirt? Is it just pee?” “Am I masturbating too much?” “Will my vibrator desensitize me?” “Do my weird sexual fantasies mean there’s something wrong with me?” “Is there anything I shouldn’t be putting in my butt?” “If I enjoy butt play, does that mean I’m gay?” “How can I make my penis bigger?” Through it all, we point out the importance of open communication, breaking down taboos, and embracing curiosity about your body and your pleasure. Have your own question or a topic idea for the show? Submit them via the links below, and join the movement to unzip taboos around sex and sexuality! If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestions If 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 today's episode of Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to dive into the topics of sex and sexuality that you might be curious about, but don't always feel comfortable talking about. No judgment, just open, honest conversation. So zip down and let's get candid. And today's episode is inspired by something that I scrolled upon in social media, and that was a BuzzFeed article where our illustrious Dr. Sue is quoted a few times.

So we thought it would be good to go through that article and chat about the questions that they highlighted. But before we get into all of that, I'm here with Dr. Sue. Hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie. How's it going? It's going pretty well, except for those of you who normally listen, you know I don't usually sound like this.

So my apologies for the different voice for today. But other than that, it's going well. Good. Do you want to give our listeners a little bit of information about your background before we unzip? Sure, because I also, if you do go and find the BuzzFeed article, which I'm sure we'll link in the description, it has information about me that's no longer accurate. So I have a PhD in human sexuality. I'm a certified educator in all sorts of things.

Primarily, I have been doing sex education work in higher education, but I also work I tease a lot where I say higher education then I say in the real world um so I do a lot of work in academia but then I also do a lot of work in the real world talking to basically anyone who wants to talk to me about sex and answering questions that way so so that is me I feel like it would be amusing to just go through and do all my intros and see how different they are but that's me in a nutshell um and now we need to hear about Charlie in a nutshell. For those of you who it's been a minute since you listened to this or who are joining us today for the first time, welcome. Charlie is our curious co-host who is always ready to explore the

ins and outs of sex, relationships, and really all of those taboo topics that we very rarely talk about as a culture. I don't know, Charlie, if you want to tell us a little bit. No, not if. Well, consensus thing. Would you like to tell us more about you? I would love to. Dr. Sue and I have been good friends for many years and found that we enjoyed talking about all matter of topics. And by virtue of her education and her profession, a lot of our conversations were centered around sex and sexuality and that's how we find ourselves here together co-hosting this podcast and I am someone who enjoys challenging taboos I always have and societal expectations of me as a woman in society and my role in my community and kind of voicing those things that people may be thinking

about or questioning, getting those, getting those daylighted so they can grow and challenge what we're told to do and how to be. So, yes. Dr. Sue, you were in BuzzFeed. I was in BuzzFeed. Yeah, you were. I do want to mention that this is the third time I've come across this article. Yeah.

it's it's funny though i didn't realize the article was being re-released and a few folks reached out to me by text and was like i found you out in the wild i'm like i don't really consider that out in the wild but okay cool um but a few friends who'd never seen it before had were like hey this is you and i'm like yeah and they're like you don't work at texas a&m anymore i'm like i do not um so when i we originally did that article i was at texas a&m but i'm not anymore but yeah so the article was just re-released so for those of you who um are wondering what the article is or haven't clicked on the link in the episode description yet the title is experts say these are the seven sex questions almost everyone has but is too

embarrassed to ask almost sounds like our intro i know right i say she i say she stole from us but she came first so um so let's dive into the questions what do you say sure i first i want to say to the um kelsey i believe was the was the original author um and i do i do love things like this because it highlights it's doing what we want to do it's highlighting that people have questions and here they are um so i just a shout out to her for for giving space to the here's general questions because i feel like that's the big thing is that people will the number of people who start questions with i don't know if this is normal or i know this is a stupid question and i'm like it's but it's not if it's a question that's important to you it's not a stupid question

and it's not like you had decent sex ed go listen to the state of sex ed episode you know i thought when we did that episode i was kind of done bitching about the state of sex ed but apparently i will do that forever i think it's the through line yeah but but i think that i don't think it's a stupid question because where else do you ask these questions and how else do you ask these questions so um so i think it's important that that articles like this exist in spaces that people are reading it so yeah and in in our um in our pre-meet before we turn on the microphones and start recording there was concern that you know this article is doing what we're trying to do And what we decided was, it's a BuzzFeed article.

It has a finite amount of words. So we wanted to dive into each question with a little bit more detail, leveraging Dr. Su's expertise and charisma around this. So here we find ourselves. Yes. All right. One by one? Sure.

No, give them all to me and I'll see if I can make them one coherent answer. All right. So for those of you following along in the article, question number one, what comes out when I squirt? Is it just pee? So it's interesting that it's interesting that I'm I'm I'm sorry, I'm like realizing now that we assume that that was a female who was asking my question, which I'm realizing is an actual huge assumption. But it's probably a female just from the way it was phrased. so here's the problem with this is that and and unfortunately there's still not a lot of research at the time that this came out I was like there's not a lot of research and then I did a post on something similar and I was like there's not a lot of research yes there's still quote to quote

the studies that have been done have been on really small samples yeah because how can you imagine recruiting someone and because we're not talking about like recalling past experiences which is a lot of what sex research is about like how how did you feel when or how often have you which requires a lot of memory um for something like this on what comes out we would actually need you to be in a space where you're masturbating or having sex i can't i think stimulated yeah in some way probably masturbation because i do know one of the studies that looked at it they had women masturbate until this happened and then like collecting it and looking at it and i don't know some people out there listening maybe like I would sign up for that study most people would

not um and then there's the funding issue because in science we are impacted by funding and we do not spend a lot of money studying the female body um or the female any yes true so I do want to point out that that that some of the information that's out there can be confusing and contradictory and it's because we don't have a lot of information because i know that when i answered the question i had said there was a difference between squirting and female ejaculation but we use those terms interchangeably and for the general person in the real world like they're not going to be like well which was it right the big question the way it usually gets phrased to me is oh my god i just like squirted and did i just pee on my partner

like that's really the big concern because and there's an embarrassment piece to that so so i'm not going to get it i'm actually going to take a different tact than i did in that article where i was like well here's what squirting is and here's what female ejaculation is it does come out of the urethra so it is technically coming through the same tube that that women pee through some of it does look chemically similar to urine some of it looks chemically similar to prostate fluid which is confusing because women do not have prostates I do not call the skein because it's technically fluid coming from something called the skein's glands and in that constant attempt we have to make bodies the same and I know I talked about

this in the aging where it was like male menopause like why do we have to call it male it's different just call it andropause we've been trying for a really long time to call the skein's glands the female prostate and I'm like but why they're two different things so some of the fluid will come from the the skeins glands and chemically that looks like prostate fluid um but some of it will come from the bladder itself and that's going to look a little bit like urine did you pee on your partner and like you were physically peeing on them the way that we think about someone urinating no did that fluid come from the same tube yes either way yes so i talked a lot i don't know if you want to jump in for a second nope okay um so the two big questions I get a lot of is

is this normal well three questions is this normal did I just pee on my partner and then why doesn't happen at all the time or why have I hasn't ever happened to me so there was this great time we were having a conversation about this in class and I was like no like totally normal for this to happen and then someone's like well what if it doesn't like am I not normal then I'm like no it's some people some women will squirt every single time they're excited um some women it will only be on certain times or certain days and like there's no rhyme or reason for some women why it happens sometimes and not others it doesn't mean you're not enjoying the sex or the sex play it just for some reason that day your body feels like squirting as a way of being like hey so

So you're not peeing on your partner in the traditional sense. It is normal since it's happening for your body. It's normal and it's normal for it to not happen all the time or not at all. Again, it's not an indicator of like, I scored it. This must be the best sex of my life. May or may not be true. So I feel like we just want to make sure we're not using squirting as an indicator of level of satisfaction or quality of sex play. yeah or or like normal experience right yeah to that question that one of your students may if

if i don't yeah am i am i not being am i not good at sex am i not in touch with my body you know all of those things so yeah and the answer is no i mean some people just will never squirt it just it just happens um so yeah it's a little bit normal if you know you are a squirter though you may want to like communicate communicate that to your partner because it can be overwhelming if suddenly there's like a lot of fluid and no one was expecting it um and if you know this is something that happens regularly for you you may just want to put something down under bodies to make sure cleanup is easier so so yeah there's the female it's interesting though i'm realizing that we all just assume that it wasn't a male asking like what's coming out of my penis so

huge assumption there but yeah but i think as you said the i don't think it's an incorrect assumption because when we talk about women's ejaculate or or what they may experience and release during sex it is commonly called squirting yeah and there is a lot giving even given the state of sex education there is a lot of education about what comes out of a man's penis yeah yeah because that's that's what we yeah that we focus on yeah so no all right anything else that you want to add to this I just I think like don't make it a goal you know don't be like oh I squirted once like if that has to be the goal that I achieve and I'm the reason I say that is that when you start thinking about like is it going to happen this time it's less likely to happen

because you're in your own head so if it happens great if it doesn't happen and you still enjoy the sex play great like don't don't make this the indicator of quality and don't make it be like the thing you're just focusing on because then it will probably not happen and you'll probably get frustrated yeah all right if you have any further questions about this particular question feel free to drop them in the comments or send it in to the show um question number two sure or any question by the way so if anything comes up today or if it's anything like remotely related to what we're talking about like feel free to drop we enjoy when we're doing things in response to what people are asking yeah all right so question number two from the article

am i masturbating too much no and i don't even know anything about you and i'm gonna say no i the problem is we don't have a lot of data we have more data on this than we do on female squirting, believe it or not, on how often people masturbate. I'm not going to give those numbers because they're based off self-report and shocker. Some people lie in sex and sex surveys. Some people lie during sex is what I almost said. And that's true, too. People don't always tell the truth in research. I know, like clutch the pearls. Let's take a second to think about that. I need to sit back down. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean

to knock out your chair there. That'll warn me. But yeah, it's all based on self-report, which is why I don't really give I don't necessarily think all the data is flawed but I don't always think it's an appropriate level of an an accurate indicator of how often people masturbate so so I can't say like if you masturbate more than once a day that it's oh here come the air quotes too much um I think we should have a sound for the air quotes but that defeats the purpose of air quotes but yeah um so here's my thing when people ask me this question i can't normalize what they're doing because i can't be like well here's the numbers masturbating is a normal occurrence for most of the population though some people choose not to

and have never done so so i don't want to say everyone does it because i think that's the big myth it's like oh everybody's done it no some people don't for whatever personal reasons so the too much piece makes me think that something else is going on and this is like if this question was asked live i'd be like so tell me where this is coming from if you are masturbating and it is not interfering with your life activities work school grocery shopping like doing the things that we need to do as humans on a daily basis if it's not getting in the way of that and it's not getting in the way of your relationship i don't really think it's an issue i would say you're not you're not masturbating too much if you're feeling guilt about it that's

more of a concern than with the frequency um or if like you're less inclined to be physical uh sorry sexually active with your partner because you're masturbated enough to like satisfy your needs if and that's what i mean when it gets in the way of a relationship so like if you're neglecting your partner to masturbate that would be the problem but it's not a it's not necessarily a frequency question it's a what's it stopping is it stopping you from doing other things that's more the issue for me than the too much if that makes sense that does make sense and i think that is you know masturbation is one of i would say one of the top taboo topics around sex and sexuality and because of shame based on maybe you grew up in a super religious community or

you know there are joke the jokes about masturbating or any of those things can contribute to shame or embarrassment and that's the same thing anyway um uh but they can contribute to these adverse feelings about something that you find yourself enjoying and i agree if it's interfering with your relationship with your partner and your sex relationship with with your partner then maybe that's something that's the thing to discuss um but i don't i'm with you i don't think that there's a too much qualifier unless it's interfering with your life yeah like if you're masturbating so much you're not making it to class on time or you're not making it to your job on time that's an issue yeah yeah but i would i

want to go back to something you said about the stigma because i think the stigma is also very different by gender there are still some women in this country who have been taught that their genitals are dirty and they should not touch them ever and so i think that when we talk about how masturbation is perceived we're much more likely to receive it as normal for men than we are for women and so if you've been if you're a woman and you've been told don't ever masturbate because you shouldn't be touching yourself and that's dirty and gross we we hear it unzipping taboos do you not believe that um but if that's how you feel then masturbating once a week might feel like too much so there's there's a lot of what you are bringing to the table in terms of what's going on

in your head that would impact how you're, you're seeing your masturbatory habits. Yeah. Agreed. Well, that was all, that almost feels like a planned segue into question number three. Which it was not because I don't have the questions in front of me. I know. Will my vibrator desensitize me? I get that question actually a lot. So I was glad when it popped up in that one um it will not desensitize you permanently because it it may for a little bit if you have like a heavy numb sensation because you were using your last your sex toy for that long that sometimes people do report feeling a little numb after using it that numbness will go away so i don't want you thinking like oh my god i feel numbness so like i i'm desensitized it that

numbness that you have will should go away if it doesn't there's actually cause for concern and not from the sex toy like i'd be more concerned about nerve issues um but the the using the toy itself is not going to desensitize you um what i think sex toys do is they help us figure out what we like so um if you you may learn things about your body and then you're like hey this feels really great and then you get with your partner and your partner doesn't do that so it feels like you're enjoying the sex play with your partner less i feel like that's some of where that question comes from like oh i've been desensitized because i'm not enjoying sex play with my partner you're not being desensitized your your partner's not hitting the right spots

for you is really what that comes down to yeah you have found your roadmap and and and your partner just needs to take a look right yeah my roadmap might be yeah and i think i think that's the big issue so some people do feel numbness from from sex toys especially vibrating sex toys so that that can happen but that should go away and if it doesn't go away in like a day I would actually consider talking to a health care professional but a lot of it really comes comes down to this idea of this feels great my partner's not doing it so I've been desensitized and it's that's not what it is it's like you said you found the roadmap share the map with your partner yeah yeah and and maybe you want you want them to explore a little bit before they get to

the roadmap and the yeah and that's the thing like some people will find in their masturbation that like I like a b and c but with their partner it doesn't feel as good because it's just being done from a different angle um or you're involved with another body and so you're focusing differently so even if you're like here's the map here's the legend here's how you get from point a to point b it may still not feel the same because you're also focusing on your partner now and you're just in a different space and you're you're thinking something different so even with the map they may not do it exactly but gives you a hint gives them a hint yeah maybe give them the maybe give them the uh the joystick and you know that could you could enter it could introduce

something fun in your sex play with your partner yeah but i do have to say and this wasn't a question um but i'm can i can i add lib and add in my own questions candidly yes thank you um one of the questions i get from women who use sex toys is how do i deal with my male partner feeling threatened by them yeah oftentimes women who have female partners i don't hear them saying my partner feels threatened by the sex toy because it doesn't look like anything the partner has on their body yeah um for folks who are female and have a male partner i have heard this idea that my partner is going to be threatened or feel like they're being replaced intimidated yeah and that's especially like if if if they're if they're x number of inches you know their penis is x number

of inches long and you're pulling out a vibrator that's like double the size they could be like okay i'm not doing enough it it really has nothing to do about competition with the penis between the sex toy and the penis it's it's really about what the person needs to get off when they're on their own and so for the women who are listening to this it's important to realize that your men may feel challenged by your use of a sex toy and you may have to have a conversation with them and be like no this doesn't replace you i don't want you to be this thing it's just the thing that i use when i'm on my own um and if the men are listening out there it's not you're not in competition with a toy so yeah this is this is something that your female partner likes to use maybe you can use it

with you know with each other but but try to check that feeling of I'm in competition with a sex toy because that's that's in your head that's not happening in the real world right right and and the introduction of it or or talking it goes back to that communication with your partner sometimes i just want to play with this toy and maybe it'd be fun to watch you use the toy and play play with me with it you know yeah so communication yeah i mean and there are great sex toys out there like there's one that mimics oral sex on a woman so it like put pop it basically just focuses on the clitoris and puts like puffs of air on it the toy can go until the toy is no longer charged a partner cannot go forever so in some ways it's it's it may be taking some of the

workload off the partner i don't want to say it that way because then it sounds like there's a competition but um toys can go longer than partners can it's a supplement yeah yeah if you want one okay number four sure let's do it oh that i feel like this question is gonna spot uh inspire its own episode um but i think it's good to highlight here as well do my weird sexual fantasies mean there's something wrong with me no no and you know the theme the theme i'm hearing through all of these is this idea of is this normal like that which is also i know i've already said this it's a theme i usually hear most of the questions that are asked at live events because we don't talk about fantasy ever in

education can you imagine if they were talking about sexual fantasies in like ninth grade health no right and and it's interesting because i always think of like fantasy as one of the safest sex there is like no one's getting an sti in a fantasy no one's getting prior unless that's your fantasy which you know more power to you um but i i like to talk about fantasy because for a lot of people it's a way of like experimenting in their head with what might turn them on and what might not turn them on the concern about can you read the question again so i can get Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I think what you are, I think it's this qualifier. Do my weird sexual fantasies mean there's something wrong with me? Yeah. And so that's where I would, thank you. So you know

me well enough to know my brain. Um, I think I would challenge that idea of weird because I don't, I don't like, I would need to know what you think is weird. And then my answer would probably be like no that's normal my only concern with fantasies that people may have is when the fantasy involves hurting others without their consent like if you're into pain more power to you and that's definitely going to be a part of your fantasy but my concern with fantasies is is if it involves another person is that person being consented consenting to it in the in the fantasy and if not and you can keep it as a fantasy like i have a fantasy but i'm going to give people ideas i have a fantasy that involves doing something to someone without consent that's

all i'm gonna say i'm not gonna go further than that because i don't want to plant any seeds yeah and you're like ah that's a fantasy and i'll never do that in the real world but in my brain i fantasize about that i'm okay with that like that's that should live in the fantasy world um it's interesting because i'm gonna go a little off topic but not really so one of the questions i get from women is i have fantasies about being raped like what's wrong with me and i'm like there's nothing wrong with you and it's not usually about you're not usually fantasizing about being raped you're fantasized about being dominated by someone else like it's not about doing things without your consent and hurting you in a way that you don't want it's about this idea

of just giving in to someone else and that's freeing but those rape fantasies are often more about domination and power than they are about actual rape so so yeah i think my only problem so i don't really know what this person considers weird i mean i feel like i've heard it all so i can't imagine anything that's like popping in my mind my only fear would be if the if the fantasy involves someone being hurt without their consent or having something done without consent if that's happening in your brain as long as it's staying in your brain and you're not exploring hurting other people in the real world that would be my only concern yeah that makes sense all right next question let's do this question number five is there anything i shouldn't

be putting in my butt so many things but really what it comes down to is anything that goes in your if you're using i don't even know where i want to start let's start with a flared base because that's that's the easiest place to start i'm just trying to figure out how to show this since we don't have video how to describe it so anything that you're putting your butt should have something that you can pull like a a lead that never goes in like a string but really what i want to say is um it should have a flared base can we also qualify that it should be something designed for or i don't know if i want to say that okay i what what came to mind was you know we're coming out of the holidays and some some uh health care professionals who work in the er

sharing videos of like this Christmas tree from Target don't use this yeah um my fear of saying don't use things that weren't designed for that is that if you can't afford sex toys and sex toys are stupid ridiculous yeah expensive yeah that makes sense yeah so that that would be my only thing because I know like for vibrators vibrators can get really expensive and some people use vibrating toothbrushes like electronic electric toothbrushes to get the vibration because it's way cheaper so yeah don't put christmas trees up your butt um i would try to avoid anything that could poke or pierce the skin or anything that could break anything with pressure yeah but you definitely want something with a flared base i'm trying

to describe like i know i'm showing you right now but listeners can't see what i'm doing so i'm kind of making a t with my fingers or a plus sign i don't know what you consider that but essentially you want something that's got a base that's so wide that it can't go in because things can get stuck up your butt i mean like you said the er doctors there's always there's always a butt box in the er with stuff that comes out of people's butts um so something that's got a flared base so it can't go that far in or something like if you're using a series of balls that are connected by um by fibers of some sort like just making sure that there's something that you can use to pull it back out so yeah my big concern would be anything that something that could get lost or

broken up there is something that we want to avoid and would this also be the place to mention if you are exploring sex anal sex play lube that is specific for anal play yeah oh excuse me so yeah um the the anus has a ph that's a little bit above neutral so somewhere like the 7.5 to 8 range and you do want to use a lube that's in that same ph range otherwise that can open you up to infection and infections in your blood are probably not that fun um so yeah you want to use a lube lube is your friend lose it lube is actually absolutely your friend if you're doing about stuff um and you want to make sure it's got the ph that's in that kind of 7.5 to 8 the problem here and the challenge is that most manufacturers don't put on the product what the ph is so that

could be a challenge um but yeah nothing that could poke or pierce the skin nothing that's going to break i'm never a fan of using glass inside human bodies like i've seen glass dildos before i'm i'm i'm sure i shouldn't say i'm sure i would like to think that they have been made in a way that they cannot break but i don't trust that yeah um so yeah nothing that and if you're using produce and this goes for any body so if you're using produce on vaginas or inside vaginas excuse me or up your butt wash it especially if it just came from the store because the same way you would wash fruit and produce before you ate it you should wash fruit or produce before you insert it because i have a couple buddies who are emts and they will get calls about people who are

having essentially reactions to the chemicals on the on the outside of these of fruit and produce and that also doesn't seem like fun yeah so but yeah a flared base where the base so the base is wider and can't go in the anus um or something where there's like a leash that doesn't i don't want to use that term because i feel like that's going to mislead people what a leash is so some way to just make sure that the whole thing is not put in and you can pull it back out so like a tether almost yeah um something that's not going to break inside something it's not going to pierce skin inside is really yeah yeah okay question number six all right if i enjoy butt play does that mean i'm gay

no and quick note this is also the question where you're quoted in the article oh crap i should have re-read the article before you did that um can i just say no and move on because that's the full answer like uh yeah i mean that aligns with how you're quoted it's nice to know i'm consistent yeah um so i'm assuming the person asking is this a male because i don't think a woman would ask that question if she enjoyed stuff i've heard about if that made her gay because i just don't feel like a woman would ask it that way so a man's g spot oh see there we go with that like male female thing so for those of you who haven't listened to previous episodes i have a really big issue when we try to like match things on males and females body just for the sake of

doing it like females go through menopause and then for a while we were calling andropause which is what happens in men male menopause i'm like why do we need to equate the two they're not the same like why do we need to do that so we refer to the male g spot but really i would like to stop calling it that so we can call it the p spot because you're pushing on the prostate and that's where the P comes from. The pleasure button. The pleasure button. There you go.

Another P. And the easiest way to get to your P spot is up your butt. So if you're doing butt play and someone is pushing on the area in your body that has this concentrated nerve endings and feels good, it's not necessarily about the person who's doing it to you. It's about the what's being done. So just because you're playing with your butt doesn't make you gay if you're male. um now if the person playing with your butt is male and you're seriously attracted to them or

just remotely attracted to them as this is happening then you are probably gay um but if if you're if you're just enjoying it and you like women then you're not gay i feel like that's yeah you're making a face at me and i don't know what that face is it just is very in line with how you're quoted. So to quote Dr. Milstein, Dr. Sue, our culture often associates anal play with being gay. Being gay is an orientation. It means that you find men attractive. Liking a finger in your butt doesn't change who you're attracted to, just the kinds of behaviors you enjoy. Yep. End quote. See, look at that. Look at you. Yeah, I used to answer these questions a time or two. so way back in the day when we used to do um digital screenings and by digit here i mean

shoving a finger up your butt not like a digit like technology digit when we used to do digital screenings for prostates which we don't do anymore just we just don't do them as like common screenings but we used to i was at an event where we were doing screenings um and i i would do the education ahead of time and then the person would come out and i'd answer any questions and you whatever needed to be done and the number of men who and most of our providers that day were male and the number of men who came out and were like scared i'm like what is good you know and one of them was like i need to talk to you i'm like grabbing me by the elbow and walking me away from all the other humans i'm like oh my god what happened back there and he's like they stuck a

finger on my butt to see if i had prostate cancer and i got an erection i i i didn't know i was gay and I'm like well like are you attracted to men and he's like no but the person doing it was male and I'm like were you attracted to the guy who was doing it and he was like well no and I'm like then you're not gay like are you still he happened to be married I'm like to a woman I'm like are you you still attracted to your wife he's like yeah I'm like you're not you're not gay you had a physiological reaction yes to someone pushing on a part of your body that is designed when it is stimulated to give you good feelings that's all it is yeah yeah oh the poor men out there i know have anxiety around this yeah and it's you know my always my fear is that for some men that

fear of being labeled gay is i really just want to go on a tangent here about how the fear and orientation is debilitating for a culture and then yeah but we're not going to see that conversation today um i worry about the number of men who are missing what might be really enjoyable sex play because of that fear that it might make them gay instead of like let me explore the body i have and see what feels good so in a lot of ways that fear is limiting their their potential pleasure which is a little sad i think it's a little sad yeah do you you mentioned that there isn't that um that type of screening anymore um what what how do they conduct the screening now so we actually don't recommend screenings um for everyone anymore for prostate

cancer so it used to be that like screening for prostate cancer was kind of like screening for a lot of other things like once you hit a certain age you do the screening every year and and we've moved away from that we've moved away from that because the tests weren't always so accurate and because prostate cancer tends, not everyone, tends to go really slowly. So there's two ways of testing for prostate cancer. There's a digital rectal exam, which is a finger up your butt, and there's a PSA, which is a blood test looking at protein-specific antigen. Sorry, prostate. Hold on. Something's going weird with my tech here.

So the two types of tests we used to do, one was a digital rectal exam where we stick a finger up your butt and check the size of the prostate, and the other is prostate-specific antigen, a PSA. And this is actually what I mentioned before when we were talking about female squirting, the PSAs. That's the same thing I was talking about. So it used to be that we would say, you know, when you hit this age, we do this for women with mammograms. When you hit this age, we want you to get screened, blah, blah, blah. And what we found was a lot of people were having really unnecessary surgery and unnecessary treatment.

So we no longer really focus on once you hit a certain age, you must get tested for prostate cancer. if you have a family history of prostate cancer we're going to encourage you to have conversations with your doctor about it starting at age 45 here's my here's my cancer risk um and they may recommend doing screenings for men i'm really trying to remember this it's either men in their 50s or men at men at 50 or men at 55 we encourage instead of just saying you need to be screened we encourage there to be a conversation with your health care provider and then for men who are over 70, 75. I wish I had these numbers in front of me. But I caught Dr. Sue off with this question because I didn't want, I didn't want us to say we don't do those screenings anymore. And for men out

out there, you know, women who are listening who have male partners or men, especially men who are listening, I wanted clarification on what to do here. Yeah. And that gave me enough time to just look it up real quick so thanks um so it is 55 so 55 is if you have a family history we recommend starting a conversation with your doctor at 45 55 to 69 we still recommend you have it just it that you have a discussion with your health care provider about the risks and the benefits because the test can be misleading um and actually for men 70 and older we don't recommend any kind of routine screening for prostate cancer because of how slow prostate cancer tends to metastasize and grow and quality of life issues because what we were finding was we were treating

a lot of men that looked like they had early signs of prostate cancer and it was the surgery from the prostate cancer that was affecting them long term with an ability to or an inability to get an erection after so so what i would say is if you're a man and you have a history of prostate cancer in your family and you were 45 years old start having that conversation if you're a man and you are 55 and older, your doctor should be initiating this conversation. But if they don't, you should have a conversation. But we don't recommend the routine screening every year like we used to. Great. Thank you for pulling that up, Dr. Sue. Yeah. It seemed in line with the question, if I enjoyed something up my butt, does that make me gay? And my concern was that

there could be men out there avoiding these conversations or or any of these or anything surrounding this because of that fear and avoiding crucial health care screenings conversations what have you yeah and I I just don't usually remember ages and recommendations because the recommendations do change so for me I'm like oh somewhere around 50 or 55 really what we're going to do is encourage you if you have a history of family history of prostate cancer or any cancer i would just recommend having a conversation with your doctor about what screenings might and this is actually for all genders like what screenings might be appropriate for you given your age so so yeah that's just i don't always remember numbers

yeah all right question number seven the last question of the article wow we got all the way through okay we did yeah and i think this actually goes in line with the question you answered on to hey Dr. Sue this week um how can I make my penis bigger oh you can't um am I supposed to give more you you can use like vacuum like like the penis pumps and the vacuum pumps um you can do that to kind of increase the the girth and how hard the erection is but that is not a long-term that's not a long-term answer what you got is what you got um there's nothing you can really do to increase the size you can do some artful manscaping around your penis to try to give you

a longer appearing penis and i know some men do that some men trim pubic hair to make their penis look a certain way but it's never there's nothing you can there's nothing you can reliably do to increase penis size any any cream or pill that's promising that is a waste of money yeah and and do you for those that want to explore using pills to make the erection harder is there any advice you would have around that um just anecdotally i had i had some friends who would buy those pills in the gas station and and then talk about having a headache afterwards yeah a lot of those a lot of those combinations you can find it at grocery stores and bodegas and um they're gonna screw a little bit with your blood pressure sometimes and that may be what's

causing headaches um the really interesting thing so i used to work with prostate cancer survivors and also their partners separately and a lot of for prostate cancer survivors a lot of them are taking things like um levitra cialis viagra and so the concern of the partner was like oh you know my partner's just getting a hard-on because they took their levitra cialis viagra those pills don't work if you're not turned on and and that's what i was trying to explain to the partner it's like you're not going to get a magic erection just because you took the pill you still have to be turned on so if you're taking those things you buy that you see the back of magazines or that You see it at the bodegas as you're checking out.

Those aren't going to make a noticeable difference, especially if you're not turned on. But there is that placebo effect of, oh, I took this pill and I have this outstanding sex. Superman. Yes, so it must be the pills. It could be those. and the placebo effect it's having and on the confidence and you believe it's going to be a great sexual experience so it's a great sexual experience but it was more because you believed it than anything else so yeah brain is powerful the brain is a powerful object i do want to note

that in this article the educator did point that was quoted for this question did point out that a 2015 study of more than 15,000 men found that the average erect penis is just over 5 inches. Mm-hmm. The length of the old iPhones used to refer to it that way, and that would actually make people feel better. But the thing I need you to keep in mind, if you're a male and you have a female partner,

and I hate to sound cliche, but it's not about the size always. think about if you think about like the inside of a vagina majority of nerve endings are actually towards the outside on the front wall so it's not about how deep you're going sometimes it's about how wide you are um and the penis isn't doing all the work i'm hoping the penis isn't doing all the work like you have hands you have mouths like you can talk you can do all these other things and so this this focus on how big a penis is to me should be a focus on how well my pleasuring my partner and the two may have nothing to do with each other yeah so yeah just something to keep in mind but don't don't waste your money on things like that it's not going to

do anything you could use cock rings to try to keep yourself harder for longer my thing is always be really careful with cock rings because if they get stuck and you have to go to the er they're gonna have to get that thing off and if it's a metal one there's only one yeah that's so what I usually recommend do you remember the scrunchies back from like what was it the 80s or the 90s yeah and and they're back in fashion are they really they are oh for those of you don't know what a scrunchie is it's a hair tie that usually has fabric around it and those make great cock rings because you can put them on and if for some reason they get stuck you can literally just cut them off at home so there are things you can do to make yourself harder and that may look like

it's giving you more length or girth because you have more blood that's staying in the penis but there's nothing you can do to make your penis bigger and that's okay yeah uh well and i did want to throw out this quote by the educator that did answer this question um the most important message for these men is simply you are more than just a penis right i think that right this like i was just saying yeah you're like yeah yeah it's about yeah it's about more than that and And that's, you know, when we talk to female partners, and I know we're being a little heterosexist here today, but when we talk to female partners about men as partners, very, very rarely do they bring up penis size. It's about a sense of connection. It's about responding to needs.

It's about lots of things. Not usually about penis size. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it, folks. that was the article do you have any additional thoughts Dr. Seale, haha I beat you to it

yeah I just if you have questions we didn't answer and I would love to answer them because I feel like part of what our challenge is to do is to normalize not only the topic of sexuality but normalizing asking questions about it

because you probably did not have a good source of education on this growing up and the more we can normalize asking the questions, that's going to help us unzip some of those taboos. It's just the freeing to ask the questions. So if you have any questions that you want us to answer or address on the show, we'll put it in the link description. If there's a question you want me to answer through my social media, we'll also include a link to that. But asking questions is one of the ways that we start normalizing sex. So thank you for those of you who are brave enough to ask

the questions. Absolutely. And as we say at the top of our show, there is no judgment. This is the space to ask them. There's nothing other than, oh, they didn't have access to this information. Well, let's get this out there. That is the reaction that Dr. Sue and I have when we do come across listener questions is, okay, let's make sure. Let's make sure we can get this information out there. There, again, no judgment. We're open. We're honest here. We're candid. Um, so please feel free to engage with us because we want, we want to be a trusted resource for you. Yeah. And like, just as an example, real quick, all of that. Yes. Um, one of the questions I had gotten once was do girls poop? And sometimes people ask me questions and they're yanking my

chain or they're trying to get a reaction. And I was talking to someone about, I got this question of do girls poop? And someone's like, Oh, why would someone ask that? I'm like, because when do we ever talk about women going to the bathroom right guys poop we make a whole big thing about it and how they spend like hours in there usually because they're on their phones doing things as well um we never talk about that as a culture so it's not it's not a bad question like yeah so just so bring on your questions bring on your topics like you said it's judgment-free zone so yeah well thanks for going on that journey with me dr sue i was so happy when i was scrolling through my social media and i was like huh i think i've seen this before but let me double check

yeah lo and behold yeah all right well everyone i want to thank you for joining us on this episode of unzipping taboos uh we hope today's episode maybe sparked new thoughts new questions maybe inspires conversations that you feel are worth having with people in your circle, your partner, whomever. Remember, as Dr. Sue said a moment ago, your curiosity is the key to breaking down these barriers and embracing a healthier understanding of sex and relationships. So if you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who might need to hear this. And as we said, if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, reach out to us via the link in the episode description,

drop a comment on this episode or any other episode you've listened to and yeah, recommend the show. I lost my train of thought all. We want to give a very special shout out to Allie O'Brien for her incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Allie. And until next time,

keep the conversation going, keep unzipping those taboos and please take care. © transcript Emily Beynon