January 23, 2024 • 43 mins
It was an era bookended by Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky. It gave us MTV’s “boxers or briefs,” popularized the MILF, and spawned the first-ever “sex tape.” But what did 90s culture really teach us about love and sex? Jess is joined by sex educator and bestselling author Emily Nagoski, whose new book, Come Together, is out this month.
Guests:
- Emily Nagoski, sex educator and bestselling author
Further reading:
- She wrote a bestseller about sex. Then her own sex life fell apart. (NY Times)
- Come Together by Emily Nagoski (her new book)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The nineties was a decade bookended by Anita Hill and
Monica Lewinsky. It gave us MTV's Boxers or Briefs moment,
popularize the concept of the milf, and spawned the first
ever sex tape, once Stolen from the home of Pamela
Anderson and Tommy Lee.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It was an era that.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Inspired a decade of boob jobs, popularized restaurants like Hooters,
and gave us girls Gone Wild. But what did all
of those things really teach us about love and sex?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Back then?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And now? We ask a sex expert.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In twenty nineteen, Gwyneth Paltrow did not know the word vulva.
She did not know that her volvo was not her vagina, which,
as I say in come As, you are calling your
vulva your vagina is like calling your face your throat.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie vannacaarm And this is
in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment
from the past that shaped us.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
And that we just can't stop thinking about today.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
We're joined by sex educator and best selling author there
Emily Nagowski.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Her new book Come Together is out this month.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So I've listened to your podcast, and I know that
on your podcast, which I think was a limited run,
you talked about how you know you weren't that into
pop culture as a young teen, But in fact I
love that on.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
One of my all time favorite.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Shows, sex Education, your book actually makes an appearance, which
was huge for me.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, I found out about that because everyone sent me
the little clip of it happening. But we don't have Netflix.
That's not a flex. We have like lots and lots
of everything. We just don't happen to have lost it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I've never seen the show and never ever, not even
your episode.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Nope, I've seen like the five seconds oh so funny,
the person saying you should read come as you are.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
I mean, I feel like they do an amazing job
of breaking down some taboos and talking openly about sexuality.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Though, when I was.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Talking to my therapist about you yesterday in our session
as happens, she was like, well, okay, but in the
first season of Sex Education, they really confused the vagina
and the vulva, which I had totally missed.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
So what do they do well? What makes you just
feel like, oh, this is better than it has been
in the past.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I guess I like that it doesn't feel so heavy handed,
like sexuality is.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Just a part.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I mean, that's the plot of the show, but they're
not making it like they're forcing it down your throat
or trying to teach you. And I guess one of
the things I remember from growing up in the nineties,
which is what we're here to talk about today, is
that everyone was portrayed, or at least the teenagers I
watched on television and movies seem to be portrayed as
these like sex hungry maniacs, where that was absolutely the
(02:48):
only thing that they could think about. And I'm curious
if you had that experience too. What were you consuming
in the nineties.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I mean, what was I consuming in the nineties. I
have never been anyone's target audience. We literally didn't even
have cable television. I didn't have cable television until I
was I didn't either there, so I didn't see any
of the things that people saw.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
What are the things you saw that other people didn't see?
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I mean I watched a lot of PBS. Okay, when
we finally did get the beginnings of cable in nineteen
ninety three ish I watched a lot of inside the
actors studio, okay, but I read a lot. So my
primary sex education came from a combination of women's magazines,
especially Glamour magazine and romance novels.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Okay, and what did those teach you?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
So I remember very distinctly reading an article in Glamor
magazine where I learned that men really like it when
women appear to be enjoying themselves, and so you should
make a lot of noise, and you should touch yourself,
like touch your own breasts and your own body, and
you should say how much you like it, because men
(03:59):
really love it women appeared to be enjoying themselves. So
by the time I got to sexual relationships, my assumption
was that it was my job to perform pleasure without
any reference to whether or not something actually felt pleasurable.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Right, Right.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
It took some time for me to recognize that I
was doing this stuff that they do in romance novels.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
So, basically, there's a script. You start with the face stuff,
boob stuff, You follow the bases, you get to the genitals.
Your genitals get hungry to have something inside them. Your
knees fall apart, you're duh, you'd want penetration, and penetration happens,
and you spiral upwards, enveloped in a cloud of ecstasy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So exactly how it happens.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
It turns out.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's not how it happens. I was shocked to discover.
So I was doing the things that the romance novels
told me I was supposed to do in terms of behavior.
I was acting like a person who enjoyed those things.
And within about six months I started getting really clear
that there was a very big difference between the things
I was doing that I was told were pleasurable and the
(05:08):
things that actually were pleasurable. I got to college in
nineteen ninety five, and one of the very first things
I did was ride my bike to the library and
go to the sex section and read the HEP Report.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
It took me three or four days, but I read
as much of it was there. There were literally pages
cut out with scissors.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Really, what, yeah, is this University of Delaware, Okay?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Born and raised in Delaware. My one true claim to
fame is that Jill Biden was my tenth grade English teacher.
Oh my gosh, really, yeah, Delaware is a very small stage.
So there's only one copy of the height Report. Many
like a big chunk of pages had been cut out.
Notice that I went back to the library over and
over to keep reading this very large book because I
was too embarrassed to check it out.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
How did you know about the hype Report.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I didn't. I just looked for the large just book
in the sex section.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Okay, okay, And turns out everyone else had done that too.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Somebody had taken a bunch of pages with them.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And to back up for a moment, you are a
sex educator, but you at this point I don't think
knew that you wanted to be a sex educator.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Not at all. You know, I was a big nerd
by the time I got to college. All I knew
was that I wanted to go to grad school for something.
And I thought, Oh, you need volunteer work on your
resume so that you look like a good candidate for
graduate school.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
And a guy living on my floor in my residence
hall was pre med and he said, oh, come be
a pure health educator with me. So you go into
residence halls and talk about like all kinds of health. Yeah,
that includes sexual health, which is mostly condoms, contraception, and consent,
and I was like, I like health, why not? So
I applied and I got accepted, and I got trained
(06:52):
to be a health educator for my fellow undergraduates at
the exact same time that I was being trained to
be a sex educate. My very first year in undergrad
nineteen ninety five ninety six, I got into my first
sexual relationship, which ended up being abusive. He became my
stalker and I'd called the police and it was very
bad news. So at the same time that I was
(07:14):
having my first experience in that kind of relationship, in
any kind of sexual relationship with someone who wasn't me,
I was also learning all this stuff about sexual communication
and sexual health and how periods work and the whole enchilada.
So I feel like it was an incredible privilege to
(07:34):
be learning what it's supposed to be like while I
am doing it. I mean, I made every mistake. I
did everything wrong, like what Unlike the students I taught.
When I was teaching undergrad, I didn't know as an
undergrad that your early relationships are very likely to recapitulate
the dynamic of your family of origin. I didn't know
that As a child, your body learns what love looks
(07:56):
and feels like. So if you think back to what
your family was like when you're, you know, approximately four
years old, the relationships of the adults around you when
you're four, would you love your life if those were
similar to the relationships you have as an adult.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
No.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
If you answer yes to that question, then your earliest
relationships are probably going to be kind of great.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Okay, Okay, Oh interesting.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I did not. My early relationships were not kind of great.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Okay, So this is ninety five. What was happening politically
in sex education? Like, set the scene a little bit
for me from your expert perch about what was happening
in the culture then around us.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I mean, we were just coming out of the AIDS crisis.
Effective medication for controlling HIV were brand new, which means
that everyone was really eager to forget as soon as
they possibly could. I didn't know the term GLBT on
(08:57):
my campus in nineteen ninety five. It was GLBT, yeah,
which it would soon change to LGBT in honor of
the role that the lesbian community played in caring for
the gay community, who were much more heavily impacted by
the AIDS crisis, So I heard lesbian and heard bisexual
for the first time in nineteen ninety five because it
(09:20):
was on college campuses that those conversations were happening. Had
nothing of that in my high school or junior high
sex education. I did get enough sex education in Delaware,
a comparatively progressive state. In the eighth grade, I learned
that HIV could not be transmitted through a drinking straw,
or by sharing a can of soda, or by sitting
(09:42):
on a toilet seat, which was great. I remember correcting
my grandmother, who wanted us to squat over public toilets
so that we didn't get AIDS. Oh wow, And like
I could tell her because I had had some sex education,
that you can't get HIV that way. She did not
believe me. Okay, well, but she was my grandmother. She
was raised in the depression and changes slow.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
To what extent did you learn about your own body
or about women's sexuality, if at all, in your sex
education courses.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I feel sure that I learned more than most people
do because I was really curious without knowing why I
was curious. But in the sixth grade, there was a
like a book giveaway of like, here are all these
textbooks we're no longer using. Oh, if you want to
take these textbooks, children feel free. And I took all
of the reproductive health books you did get my hands on.
I was very interested.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
So there were a lot of signs of your future profession.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
You just didn't know them yet.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I had no idea why I was interested. But it
was all biology. It was all the menstrual cycle and
nocturnal emissions, as it always is. The sixth grade we
got divided by group. I had already started having my
period by the time we had that, so I was
just like, neither of this is describing what it's actual.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And what was happening politically at the time, Like I
just keep thinking about Okay. So the nineties was bookended
by the Clarence Thomas hearings, which are typically referred to
as they need a Hill hearings, but he was the
one that was being questioned. And then the Bill Clinton
Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was in ninety eight and which
(11:24):
was I think for me a real sex education. I
specifically remember reading the Star Report in high school sort
of like sneaking behind the lockers and like, okay, I
mean yeah, Seattle and the nineties. Man, so yeah, we
were reading the Star Report. But like the cigar I mean,
I let that's like I learned that, yes, that was
(11:45):
your hyper and yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, learning that a cigar could be inserted into a
vagina and people might think that was a sexy thing
to do.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, And I think that I only know this because
I then later profiled Monica Lensky and I've done a
lot of research on it.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Cigar sales went through the roof. Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
So you know how you're talking about how the sort
of representation of teenagers in the movies was that teenagers
were all super horny.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I think of the nineties as sort of the transition
from second to third wave feminism, and there was this
sort of cluging around sexuality which never really got resolved.
In second wave feminism, there were the sex wars, and like,
we never really figured out a position to have about
(12:32):
sex as like a good or a bad thing, porn
as a good or a bad thing. I have so
many things to say, but I think what happened in
the nineties is that popular culture took the idea that
sex could be a good thing for women it took
the sort of sexual revolution as far as it had
gone so far, and said, okay, so teenage girls are
just as horny and wacky as teenage boys, because in
(12:56):
order for men and women to be equal, women had
to be like men. And so the way teenage girls
sexuality got represented in the media was as if it
were the same as every teenage boy's fantasy, which is
to say, just the same as theirs. Easy, fast, vaginally
(13:19):
oriented American pie gets talked about a lot, Thank the
Good Lord for Eugene Levy.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
But so the flute scene, okay, please, because okay, this
came out in nineteen eighty nine, so I was a
junior in high school.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
We all obviously watched it.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
People were talking about it, the pie seeing it like
he masturbates with the pie, like everyone now knows this.
I feel like so many things came out of this movie,
including the popularization of the term milf, which was Stiffler's
mom that.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
I did not realize.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I mean, I don't think the term originated there, but
like that's when I learned it, and it was played
by Jennifer Coolidge, and so anyway, that's another thing that
came out of that but I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was in the orchestra.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I played the violin, And there is the scene in
American Pie where we learn that the flute player has
masturbated with her flue.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Did she masturbate with it? Because here's what I remember
her saying is that she put her flute in her vagina.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Mm.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Interesting, yeah, actually bare point.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And as a sex educator, I hear that, and I
do not hear masturbation. I hear experimentation with a like, huh,
Foullis shaped object when I know that only very roughly
ten percent of people with vagina's masturbate with vaginal penetration.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
So interesting, That's so I think she was just like
I need. Yeah, she was messing around. But of course
that then became the thing that, like, I could never
go to orchestra again without like all of the guys
snickering every time one of the women would play the flute.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Yeah, of course, of course, because the whole function of
that story is not to talk about her sexual experience
or her sexual pleasure, but to create a visual image
for the boys to masturbate too. I mean, just like
what I learned from Glamour magazine in the nineties, women's
sexual self expression exists for the pleasure of men.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I was just talking to one of my editors about Glamour.
I was working on a piece about Britney Spears and hair,
the politics of hair, because she talks in her new
book about thrashing her hair and when she shaved her
head and how it made her ugly and for the
first time in her life she was not sexualized. But
we were talking about remembering some of those sex tips
(15:39):
that we learned from magazines like Glamour, where they would
tell you to use your hair during the sex act
like either twirlet or like you know, run it down
a guy's chest or something, which is just so hilarious
to think about now, But back then we didn't have
the knowledge or experience to note that that was anything
but a weird thing head made up.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I mean, I guess, like, if you're into that, go
for it.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
But the brushing of the hair, like your partner's body
might respond well to the sensation of your hair brushing
against them until the right circumstances, is not the same
as like play with your hair, perform your hair area
for the other person to witness.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
This is one of the things that I find so
refreshing about your work is that you take these commonly
held assumptions or things that we have heard, and then
you basically debunk them or unravel them to reveal what
is actually going on.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
It's one of the reasons why even now, when I
have lots of different channels for viewing pop culture, kind
of don't watch a lot of it because when it
involves sex, like, the thing goes off in my head
and I have to be like that it has not
how that works.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, it's like we need the annotations from you while
we are watching the thing.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, like, ps, this is fine. And also just know
that it's actually really rare for a person to be
able to go instantaneously from being very stressed out to
feeling very turned on. For most people, that's not how
it works.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
What are the things that you remember consuming in the
nineties that made you think twice or as an adult
you realize that that's actually not an accurate representation.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
There's something about Mary.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Oh Jesus, what bothered you about that one?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah? So the thing from There's Something about Mary is
that Cameron Diaz uses ejaculate that is dangling off of
She's like, oh, it's hair gel, and she puts it
in her hair. Yeah, anyone who is actually touched, touched
any ejaculate knows that it just does not bear any
(17:59):
relationships the texture of hair gel. Like it's a silly idea,
but as a nerd, I just find it totally unbelievable
and it reflects negatively on the intelligence of Cameron Diaz's
character that she could possibly mistake the texture of ejaculate
(18:21):
for the texture of hair gel. And also can she
not smell it? Like, it doesn't smell like hairjel. There's
no hair gel. It is ejaculate scented fresh scent. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Wait, you mentioned Eugene Levy earlier.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Do you have some fun fact about Eugene Levy in
American Pie?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well, so, from what I've heard, he was initially not
very interested in playing the father, and he worked with
them pretty intensively to shape the character into what like
a father might actually do. And I love the way
as a dat he does not play into like, yeah, son,
go get as much of that blussy as you can get.
(19:03):
But he also doesn't dismiss his son sexuality. He wants
to protect him from the inevitable embarrassments of being a
teenage boy, like, we'll just have to tell your mother
we ate the whole thing, and like brings him porn, which,
you know what for the mid nineties, fairly progressive to be.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Like here, yeah, here it is.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
This is a normal part of life.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
This is hustler, and this is a much more exotic magazine.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Are there common sex myths that you still come across today?
I don't think are you teaching at the moment, but
I know that you are generally teaching, and so I'm
sure that this comes up in class.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah. So, Over the last few since the pandemic, in particular,
I have spent more time training professionals, training therapists, and
it is sometimes distressing how many of the same misunderstandings
and myths stay in their minds as I meet within
(20:05):
college students. Several years ago, I talked to a woman
who was recently out of college. She came to a
talk and she said, so, this thing I learned in
high school was that if you masturbate, if you teach
yourself how to have an orgasm by yourself, you won't
be able to have an orgasm with a partner. And
she's like a full grown adult and is asking this question.
(20:27):
I was like, yeah, it's the opposite of true. Actually,
if as a young person you learn how orgasm works
in your body, that means you know how orgasm works
in your body, so that when you're with another person,
which is a much more complex situation where part of
your brain might be tuned into what's happening in your body,
but part of your brain is also tuned in to
what's going on for your partner, and so HM, with
(20:49):
your attention split like that, it's actually more difficult to
focus on pleasure and let your body have an orgasm.
So it's great if you've already got the groundwork laid,
so to speak, for knowing like what the path is
to get to orgasm in your body, then you can
teach your partner how to follow that path. Okay, And
(21:10):
I got asked almost exactly the same question by a
therapist and a training five years later.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Was this a sex therapist?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
No?
Speaker 3 (21:18):
No, no, no no, So this is like marriage and
family therapist, couples therapists like it makes you feel slightly
about her, but like you do worry?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right, are there other things that you remember consuming in
the nineties. I think you mentioned the X files.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
So probably one of the very best episodes of The
X Files is Small Potatoes, which is an episode about
a shape shifter. Sunday got in all New X Files.
How do you find someone?
Speaker 1 (21:50):
We're looking for a man who can appear to be
his own father or anyone else.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Who can transform him. So is everything okay into anyone
who these days would be called an in cell okay,
except that he was not celibate because he would shape
shift into the forms of more attractive men who had partners,
and he would have sex with them the women and
(22:14):
he got found out because they were having babies with tails.
Now this is actually, on reflection, a story of serial rapist,
and it is treated as comedy, right, I mean it's.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
A farce, right right right In the nineties when I.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Watched it, I just all all I focused on was
the comedy because that is how they framed it. And
in retrospect, uh like, actually violent sexual perpetrator yikes.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Right right, I mean there's so many examples of that, right,
Like if you look back, we just did an episode
on Dawson's Creek.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Which I have never seen.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I mean, it's a terrible more power to you like
it wasn't great, then it's not great on rewatch, so
I know there are a lot of fans and I
did watch it. But there's this one storyline where Pacey,
who is the off lead character, he's the best friend
of Dawson, who the show is named after, begins a
relationship with and loses his virginity to his English teacher
(23:19):
and oh right, yeah, grown woman, and it's just portrayed
as super hot, and I remember as a teenager being like, oh,
I want to see what happens with this relationship, like
that's so hot, and obviously in retrospect that was a
statutory rape, right, So.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Many portrayals like that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
But I was even thinking back to just like basic
things that I internalized in high school that it took
me years to realize we're not true. So I just learned,
I think in the last six months from Twitter. Thanks Twitter,
I guess that blue balls are not real. When did
(23:56):
you just learn this, like five seconds ago? Oh and
I'm married to a man.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
And he was like, Babe, like, yeah, of course they're
not really, it's so here And I was like, uh wait,
what I.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Would be interested if you could find out where you
learned it, because I don't remember where I learned of
it either.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
I mean maybe just like people talking about it or
like being in sexual contexts where you but I don't
even think some a guy would have said it. I
think it was like, oh, we all knew that, like
it was going to be so so painful for a
man if you somehow aroused them and then didn't finish it.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So again, I had the good fortune of being trained
as a sex educator even before I started being sexual myself,
and I explicitly remember being told that, like some guys
will try to use this narrative of blue balls as
justification for trying to persuade a partner. No, they have
to continue doing a thing or else harm will come
to them. And so like the deal is, no. Can
(25:03):
it be uncomfortable to be aroused for a very long
time and not have an orgasm? Yeah, there's a reason
why those vagerate commercials say if your erection lasts more
than four hours, seek medical help, because it can be
really uncomfortable. Nothing bad happens to you, there's nothing dangerous
about it. It's a little bit like getting a Charlie horse.
(25:26):
So it's not real comfortable. But the underlying narrative behind
it is that boys have a sexual imperative, a need,
and because it's a biological need, they are entitled to
have that need met or else something bad could happen
to them. This is a narrative that has been in
place for very long time. If you go back and
(25:48):
read sex manuals from the late eighteen hundred of the
late nineteenth century, you'll begin to see the split between
the people who say, then have a biological need for
sexual release, and they use that as an argument in
favor of legalizing prostitution as a matter of fact, in
(26:09):
order to spare all these men's wives having to have
all the sex that men need or else. And then
you have on the other side, right at the turn
of the century, you begin to hear from sex educators
who are like, it is not a biological need, nothing
bad happens to men if they don't have any sort
of sexual release. Men just need to learn how to
(26:30):
control themselves, and they use it as an argument in
favor of abstinence only.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Until marriage, right right, right right.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
And you do kind of look back and wish that
either side could have found something better to do with
their time. So biologically it is not a need. I
don't think that that's an argument in favor of abstinence
only before marriage. So if you've read Girls by Peggy Ornstein,
her book Girls and her book Boys are both raw.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Dropping girls and sex, Girls and.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Sex and boys and sex, Thank you very much. One
story that I remember from Girls is from a teenager
that she interviewed who said, this guy came over to
my house and we were making out and that was
sort of all I wanted to do, but he wanted
to have sex, and so like I gave him a
blowjob so that he would leave my house. Yeah, And
(27:22):
on the one hand, like, hooray for survival strategies, hooray
for finding a way out of that situation where she
was not putting herself in the path of physical harm,
which is a potential thing.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Did she feel in danger were she to leave or
did she.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
She felt like she had no other way to get
him to leave the house. She wanted him to go.
He kept saying, no, I wasn't gonna go. He wanted
to have sex, all come on, all that stuff, Like
the only way to get him out of the house
was to give him something. But on the other hand,
like that's that's like deeply not okay, and none of
us would want a daughter of our own to be
(27:59):
in the situation.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
I mean, that reminds me of another lesson that I
think I learned and internalized as a teenager, which was
no does not mean no, No means convince me. And
the number of times that played out, and I think,
you know, I think that that was very prominent in
like teen films at that time, like even It's Super Bad.
(28:21):
I think the guys there are talking about, you know,
if you if you get here.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Drunk enough, she'll she'll say yes.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
But another one of those lessons, I guess I'm curious
how much of your work is almost about re education,
like re educating us on how things actually work after
years and years and years of being misinformed.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Ninety eight point nine percent of my work is simply
like that thing you learned before, that's not true. I
understand why you believed it. It was the thing you
were taught, and why wouldn't you believe the thing that
you were taught. So some of the things are about facts,
like blue balls. That's just like a biological reality. Is
that no tissue damn which occurs to a human in
the absence of sexual release, right, Like, that's just a
(29:05):
fact when it comes to things like no means no, yeah,
And if you have sex with someone who's drunk, that's
sexual assault. That's like a cultural relearning where you're shifting
people's norms, even people's morals, in their understanding of what
it means to be a sexual person, how to be
a good sexual partner. And ultimately it's deconstructing this gender binary, right,
(29:33):
like rejecting the whole idea that like men have one
sexual script and women have another sexual script, and those
are the only sexual scripts that exist, and you have
to follow the one that you've been given. And there
is a complexity here because on the one hand, no
means no, and having sex with a drug person is assault,
and because the script for girls is that you're not
(29:55):
allowed to initiate even though you're supposed to really enjoy
sex and you're supposed to you have a great time
when you have sex, and you're supposed to be a
sexual person who is good at the sex, you also
are supposed to not want sex. You're not supposed to
initiate sex, and you were not supposed to say yes
because wanting it and liking it are not very feminine.
(30:18):
We have both of these competing scripts simultaneously. And so
for a long time, girls in real life who are
exploring their sexuality, trying to find out what it is
they want in life didn't feel cultural permission to go
ahead and say yes to the things that they wanted
and liked, right, And so maybe they would say no
(30:38):
and do things that they wanted to do, but they
were saying the no they felt they were supposed to say. Like,
I think there has been a complexity and a grayness,
Like there's been controversy over the Christmas song Baby It's
called outside, Yeah Yeah, where like she's saying no, but
she's saying no because she feels like she's not allowed
(30:59):
to say yes, and she actually like really wants to
say yes.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yep, yep. Wait, what are the lyrics?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I really can't stay it's cold outside. I gotta go away.
It's cold outside. This evening has been so very nice
and warm. I ought to.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Say no, no you at least I'm gonna say that.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I wait, but it's cold outside. She sings it too,
but it's cold outside, So there's ambiguity.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
You're describing cultural scripts which of course are an important
part of this. But it's almost as if the more
factual things you're discussing, the things that we learned in
the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Get talked about less.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yes, in reading your book, Come as you are, I
was so struck by how many basic facts I was
learning for the first time or relearning for the first time.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
And so while you think that those would be easy.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Things to reteach or correct, it's almost as if we're
talking about, you know, the patriarchy and cultural scripts and
what consent means much more often than we're talking about
these literal facts.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Yes, literal actual just biological facts about the lack of
correlation between how your genitals are behaving and how you
personally feel.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Are there a few basic facts that I should have
you debunk for us right here while we have you like,
what are the most caught What are the things we
need to know?
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Can we start with virginity since we were talking about
American pie Whease virginity is not it's not a biological thing,
biological fact of any kind. It cannot be like, what
the heck? What the heck is virginity?
Speaker 2 (32:57):
The idea of the cherry.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
And in biolog turns the hymen. The hymen is a
fold of tissue. It is like all of our tissues.
If it gets damaged, it heals. Hymen can be stretched.
But there are people who have given birth who have
intact hymens. My husband laughingly calls it a freshness seal,
(33:21):
like just that whole thing, all of it derives from
several hundred years ago, medieval biologists medical practitioners looking at
a fold of skin sort of over the mouth of
a vagina and deciding because they live in a culture
where a woman's body is literally a man's property, and
(33:44):
her lack of having had a penis in her vagina
yet matters insofar as a man wants his property to
be in good condition. He wants not to invest his
resources in raising someone else's offspring. And like you never
can fully get can control over a woman's sexuality, but like,
at least that fold of skin is some assurance that
(34:06):
that vagina is fresh, right with all biological nonsense, because
you can't tell based on the presence of absence of
a hymen whether not anybody has ever had anything put
into their vagina before.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Okay, so that's virginity. Yeah, what's another common one.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Blue balls, of course, would definitely go on the list
of like this. This is not a thing attached to it.
The idea of sex as a biological drive, like hunger
is a drive. If you don't have adequate energy intake,
you can literally die. First biological drive. If you have
inadequate balance of water and sodium, you can literally die.
Sleep is a drive. If you do not get adequate sleep,
(34:45):
you can literally die. Sex is not one of those.
Sex is an incentive motivation system. And no, I'm not
under a delusion that we're all gonna stop saying the
simple and easy sex drive and start saying sexual incentive
motivation system. But if we could all just get real
clear that we do not mean that sex is a
biological need without which anybody will die, that would be
(35:06):
super good.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Is there one sex myth that if you could just
do one thing and eradicate it?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Can I choose a cluster of myths around what I'm
going to colloquially call women's orgasm? Please, So the research
here's my gender caveat. Virtually all the research on women's
orgasms is done on cisgender women. So I see no
reason why all of this doesn't apply to anyone who's
a woman, but know that the research is talking about
(35:38):
sisgender women.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
That's the caveat yep.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
First of all, as I said, only about ten ish
percent of women who masturbate do so with any kind
of vaginal penetration. That's been shown in study after study
after study for the last fifty years. Only a quarter
to like maybe a third of women are reliably orgasmic
from vaginal penetration alone, or as it's called in the research,
(36:03):
unassisted intercourse, one of my favorite technical terms. The remaining
two thirds to three quarters are sometimes rarely or never
orgasmic from vaginal stimulation alone. And the only reason why
I still get asked like, how do I have an
orgasm during sex? Is the way people say it. They
(36:23):
mean during penal vaginal intercourse. How come I'm not having them?
The reason you're not having them is because approximately two
thirds to three quarters of people with vaginas, that's not
a very good way for them to get the kind
of stimulation they need to get to orgasm because the
vagina is pretty far away from the glitterists, which is
for most people, not all, but for most people, the
(36:45):
most efficient path to getting to orgasm and The only
reason people still care about this is because I think
of freakin' freckin' Freud, whose influence on psychotherapy will not die.
Saying that clteral orgasms are immature and vaginal orgasms are mature.
That is an extremely convenient line for the patriarchy and
(37:08):
the misogyny, and a world in which men would really
benefit from women being orgasmic, from the kind of behavior
by which heterosexual men are very reliably orgasmic.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
It's so interesting, though, because, Okay, for people who haven't
studied fraud, these myths persist, Like why do they, I mean,
besides the patriarchy, why do they persist?
Speaker 3 (37:33):
Sex is a big deal, and women's bodies in the
world of the gender binary have to be controlled because
a whole lot of the genetic destiny of our species
happens inside of uteruses, and so we have to control
the uteruses, which means we have to control the women,
(37:56):
which means not only making laws about it, but havingultural
narratives about right and wrong, about beautiful and ugly, about
disgusting and perfect that train us all to be good
from very young, to be good at being the right
kind of sexual person.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And what about the role of pop culture to perpetuate
or to teach us healthy sexual habits.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Yeah, because pop culture is so powerful, because these narratives
form our framework for understanding how our own sexuality works.
And I say that as someone who even though I
have like all this education and all this experience, I
still find myself falling into the same self critical traps
(38:46):
of comparing my sexuality to other people's sexuality, or to
like the cultural narrative of how sexuality works. Like now,
as a perimount apausal forty something lady married to somebody,
when my sexual desire isn't like when the spark isn't
still alive in my marriage, I think, oh no, there's
something terribly wrong. And like I wrote a whole book
(39:06):
about how oh no, nothing is terribly wrong, Like I
know exactly how to fix it, and I still my
first response is still to a panic that I'm doing
it wrong, that I'm broken, that I'm an inadequate wife.
So I think it clearly is very powerful. It embeds
narratives in our head of how sex is supposed to work.
And only by having an enormously diverse range of stories,
(39:30):
only by having a whole lot of different narratives about
ways that you can be sexual and do sex? Right,
do we get a liberating pop culture narrative? Is when
there's dozens of them? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah? Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (39:47):
I like had a lot of feelings and then words happened,
and I don't know that any of them formed sentences.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
No, that's amazing, But.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
I really meant it.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Is there anything out there you think does it well.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Of mainstream pop culture? I would be really interested to
hear from listeners like, what have you seen that you
feel like does a good job of representing sexuality in
a way where it shows a world that you would
want your kids to grow up in or that you
wish you had grown up in. One of the episodes
in the podcast that I made with Pushkin was on
(40:22):
Ted Lasso.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
They picked it because it's one of the few shows
that I watch, and I feel like that show did
a pretty darn good job of sexuality. I feel like
it was extremely silly in its relationships, but the sexual relationships,
such the little bit that they showed, were pretty great. Actually,
like the communication was on point. The equality of different
(40:46):
people to be able to initiate sex and say no
to sex was really good, but there just wasn't a
lot of sex in it.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's actually a perfect place to
end it with the call out to our listeners posed
by you.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, so I can know, like when somebody asks me,
but what can I watch that's good, that I'll be
able to be like, here's a.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
List Before I let you go, Could you say a
few words about the new book.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Oh sure, it's called Come Together. I was very proud
when I thought of that title, because it is about
how couples sustain a sexual connection over the long term,
couples of all combinations and all structures, whether monogamous or not.
It comes from the fact that writing and promoting Come
as you Are diminished my interest in sex to less
(41:34):
than zero. And when I got done with that project,
which you'd think writing and thinking and talking about sex
all the time might make it easier, turns out no,
I had zero interest for like months at a time.
So when that was over, I started looking at the research,
of course, because that's what I do, on how couples
do sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term,
(41:55):
And what I learned changed my own sex life, and
I wrote a book about it to help other people
in a similar situation.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
This Is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books
Feminist Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media.
Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Jaron
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 5 (42:51):
Our executive producer from the Media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producer from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Our artwork is from Pentagram.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Additional editing helps from Mary Do Sound correction and mastering
by Amanda Rose Smith.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
We are your hosts, Susie Bannoncarum.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even
more check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.
The nineties was a decade bookended by Anita Hill and
Monica Lewinsky. It gave us MTV's Boxers or Briefs moment,
popularize the concept of the milf, and spawned the first
ever sex tape, once Stolen from the home of Pamela
Anderson and Tommy Lee.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
It was an era that.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Inspired a decade of boob jobs, popularized restaurants like Hooters,
and gave us girls Gone Wild. But what did all
of those things really teach us about love and sex?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Back then?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And now? We ask a sex expert.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
In twenty nineteen, Gwyneth Paltrow did not know the word vulva.
She did not know that her volvo was not her vagina, which,
as I say in come As, you are calling your
vulva your vagina is like calling your face your throat.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
I'm Jessica Bennett and I'm Susie vannacaarm And this is
in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment
from the past that shaped us.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
And that we just can't stop thinking about today.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
We're joined by sex educator and best selling author there
Emily Nagowski.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Her new book Come Together is out this month.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So I've listened to your podcast, and I know that
on your podcast, which I think was a limited run,
you talked about how you know you weren't that into
pop culture as a young teen, But in fact I
love that on.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
One of my all time favorite.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Shows, sex Education, your book actually makes an appearance, which
was huge for me.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, I found out about that because everyone sent me
the little clip of it happening. But we don't have Netflix.
That's not a flex. We have like lots and lots
of everything. We just don't happen to have lost it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I've never seen the show and never ever, not even
your episode.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Nope, I've seen like the five seconds oh so funny,
the person saying you should read come as you are.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
I mean, I feel like they do an amazing job
of breaking down some taboos and talking openly about sexuality.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Though, when I was.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Talking to my therapist about you yesterday in our session
as happens, she was like, well, okay, but in the
first season of Sex Education, they really confused the vagina
and the vulva, which I had totally missed.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
So what do they do well? What makes you just
feel like, oh, this is better than it has been
in the past.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I guess I like that it doesn't feel so heavy handed,
like sexuality is.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Just a part.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I mean, that's the plot of the show, but they're
not making it like they're forcing it down your throat
or trying to teach you. And I guess one of
the things I remember from growing up in the nineties,
which is what we're here to talk about today, is
that everyone was portrayed, or at least the teenagers I
watched on television and movies seem to be portrayed as
these like sex hungry maniacs, where that was absolutely the
(02:48):
only thing that they could think about. And I'm curious
if you had that experience too. What were you consuming
in the nineties.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
I mean, what was I consuming in the nineties. I
have never been anyone's target audience. We literally didn't even
have cable television. I didn't have cable television until I
was I didn't either there, so I didn't see any
of the things that people saw.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
What are the things you saw that other people didn't see?
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I mean I watched a lot of PBS. Okay, when
we finally did get the beginnings of cable in nineteen
ninety three ish I watched a lot of inside the
actors studio, okay, but I read a lot. So my
primary sex education came from a combination of women's magazines,
especially Glamour magazine and romance novels.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Okay, and what did those teach you?
Speaker 3 (03:37):
So I remember very distinctly reading an article in Glamor
magazine where I learned that men really like it when
women appear to be enjoying themselves, and so you should
make a lot of noise, and you should touch yourself,
like touch your own breasts and your own body, and
you should say how much you like it, because men
(03:59):
really love it women appeared to be enjoying themselves. So
by the time I got to sexual relationships, my assumption
was that it was my job to perform pleasure without
any reference to whether or not something actually felt pleasurable.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Right, Right.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
It took some time for me to recognize that I
was doing this stuff that they do in romance novels.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
So, basically, there's a script. You start with the face stuff,
boob stuff, You follow the bases, you get to the genitals.
Your genitals get hungry to have something inside them. Your
knees fall apart, you're duh, you'd want penetration, and penetration happens,
and you spiral upwards, enveloped in a cloud of ecstasy.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
So exactly how it happens.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
It turns out.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's not how it happens. I was shocked to discover.
So I was doing the things that the romance novels
told me I was supposed to do in terms of behavior.
I was acting like a person who enjoyed those things.
And within about six months I started getting really clear
that there was a very big difference between the things
I was doing that I was told were pleasurable and the
(05:08):
things that actually were pleasurable. I got to college in
nineteen ninety five, and one of the very first things
I did was ride my bike to the library and
go to the sex section and read the HEP Report.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Ah.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
It took me three or four days, but I read
as much of it was there. There were literally pages
cut out with scissors.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Really, what, yeah, is this University of Delaware, Okay?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Born and raised in Delaware. My one true claim to
fame is that Jill Biden was my tenth grade English teacher.
Oh my gosh, really, yeah, Delaware is a very small stage.
So there's only one copy of the height Report. Many
like a big chunk of pages had been cut out.
Notice that I went back to the library over and
over to keep reading this very large book because I
was too embarrassed to check it out.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
How did you know about the hype Report.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I didn't. I just looked for the large just book
in the sex section.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Okay, okay, And turns out everyone else had done that too.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Somebody had taken a bunch of pages with them.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And to back up for a moment, you are a
sex educator, but you at this point I don't think
knew that you wanted to be a sex educator.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Not at all. You know, I was a big nerd
by the time I got to college. All I knew
was that I wanted to go to grad school for something.
And I thought, Oh, you need volunteer work on your
resume so that you look like a good candidate for
graduate school.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
And a guy living on my floor in my residence
hall was pre med and he said, oh, come be
a pure health educator with me. So you go into
residence halls and talk about like all kinds of health. Yeah,
that includes sexual health, which is mostly condoms, contraception, and consent,
and I was like, I like health, why not? So
I applied and I got accepted, and I got trained
(06:52):
to be a health educator for my fellow undergraduates at
the exact same time that I was being trained to
be a sex educate. My very first year in undergrad
nineteen ninety five ninety six, I got into my first
sexual relationship, which ended up being abusive. He became my
stalker and I'd called the police and it was very
bad news. So at the same time that I was
(07:14):
having my first experience in that kind of relationship, in
any kind of sexual relationship with someone who wasn't me,
I was also learning all this stuff about sexual communication
and sexual health and how periods work and the whole enchilada.
So I feel like it was an incredible privilege to
(07:34):
be learning what it's supposed to be like while I
am doing it. I mean, I made every mistake. I
did everything wrong, like what Unlike the students I taught.
When I was teaching undergrad, I didn't know as an
undergrad that your early relationships are very likely to recapitulate
the dynamic of your family of origin. I didn't know
that As a child, your body learns what love looks
(07:56):
and feels like. So if you think back to what
your family was like when you're, you know, approximately four
years old, the relationships of the adults around you when
you're four, would you love your life if those were
similar to the relationships you have as an adult.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
No.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
If you answer yes to that question, then your earliest
relationships are probably going to be kind of great.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Okay, Okay, Oh interesting.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I did not. My early relationships were not kind of great.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Okay, So this is ninety five. What was happening politically
in sex education? Like, set the scene a little bit
for me from your expert perch about what was happening
in the culture then around us.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I mean, we were just coming out of the AIDS crisis.
Effective medication for controlling HIV were brand new, which means
that everyone was really eager to forget as soon as
they possibly could. I didn't know the term GLBT on
(08:57):
my campus in nineteen ninety five. It was GLBT, yeah,
which it would soon change to LGBT in honor of
the role that the lesbian community played in caring for
the gay community, who were much more heavily impacted by
the AIDS crisis, So I heard lesbian and heard bisexual
for the first time in nineteen ninety five because it
(09:20):
was on college campuses that those conversations were happening. Had
nothing of that in my high school or junior high
sex education. I did get enough sex education in Delaware,
a comparatively progressive state. In the eighth grade, I learned
that HIV could not be transmitted through a drinking straw,
or by sharing a can of soda, or by sitting
(09:42):
on a toilet seat, which was great. I remember correcting
my grandmother, who wanted us to squat over public toilets
so that we didn't get AIDS. Oh wow, And like
I could tell her because I had had some sex education,
that you can't get HIV that way. She did not
believe me. Okay, well, but she was my grandmother. She
was raised in the depression and changes slow.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
To what extent did you learn about your own body
or about women's sexuality, if at all, in your sex
education courses.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I feel sure that I learned more than most people
do because I was really curious without knowing why I
was curious. But in the sixth grade, there was a
like a book giveaway of like, here are all these
textbooks we're no longer using. Oh, if you want to
take these textbooks, children feel free. And I took all
of the reproductive health books you did get my hands on.
I was very interested.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
So there were a lot of signs of your future profession.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
You just didn't know them yet.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
I had no idea why I was interested. But it
was all biology. It was all the menstrual cycle and
nocturnal emissions, as it always is. The sixth grade we
got divided by group. I had already started having my
period by the time we had that, so I was
just like, neither of this is describing what it's actual.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And what was happening politically at the time, Like I
just keep thinking about Okay. So the nineties was bookended
by the Clarence Thomas hearings, which are typically referred to
as they need a Hill hearings, but he was the
one that was being questioned. And then the Bill Clinton
Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was in ninety eight and which
(11:24):
was I think for me a real sex education. I
specifically remember reading the Star Report in high school sort
of like sneaking behind the lockers and like, okay, I
mean yeah, Seattle and the nineties. Man, so yeah, we
were reading the Star Report. But like the cigar I mean,
I let that's like I learned that, yes, that was
(11:45):
your hyper and yes, exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, learning that a cigar could be inserted into a
vagina and people might think that was a sexy thing
to do.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Right, And I think that I only know this because
I then later profiled Monica Lensky and I've done a
lot of research on it.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Cigar sales went through the roof. Yeah, yeah, but.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
So you know how you're talking about how the sort
of representation of teenagers in the movies was that teenagers
were all super horny.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
I think of the nineties as sort of the transition
from second to third wave feminism, and there was this
sort of cluging around sexuality which never really got resolved.
In second wave feminism, there were the sex wars, and like,
we never really figured out a position to have about
(12:32):
sex as like a good or a bad thing, porn
as a good or a bad thing. I have so
many things to say, but I think what happened in
the nineties is that popular culture took the idea that
sex could be a good thing for women it took
the sort of sexual revolution as far as it had
gone so far, and said, okay, so teenage girls are
just as horny and wacky as teenage boys, because in
(12:56):
order for men and women to be equal, women had
to be like men. And so the way teenage girls
sexuality got represented in the media was as if it
were the same as every teenage boy's fantasy, which is
to say, just the same as theirs. Easy, fast, vaginally
(13:19):
oriented American pie gets talked about a lot, Thank the
Good Lord for Eugene Levy.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
But so the flute scene, okay, please, because okay, this
came out in nineteen eighty nine, so I was a
junior in high school.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
We all obviously watched it.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
People were talking about it, the pie seeing it like
he masturbates with the pie, like everyone now knows this.
I feel like so many things came out of this movie,
including the popularization of the term milf, which was Stiffler's
mom that.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
I did not realize.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I mean, I don't think the term originated there, but
like that's when I learned it, and it was played
by Jennifer Coolidge, and so anyway, that's another thing that
came out of that but I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was in the orchestra.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
I played the violin, And there is the scene in
American Pie where we learn that the flute player has
masturbated with her flue.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Did she masturbate with it? Because here's what I remember
her saying is that she put her flute in her vagina.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Mm.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Interesting, yeah, actually bare point.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
And as a sex educator, I hear that, and I
do not hear masturbation. I hear experimentation with a like, huh,
Foullis shaped object when I know that only very roughly
ten percent of people with vagina's masturbate with vaginal penetration.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
So interesting, That's so I think she was just like
I need. Yeah, she was messing around. But of course
that then became the thing that, like, I could never
go to orchestra again without like all of the guys
snickering every time one of the women would play the flute.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Yeah, of course, of course, because the whole function of
that story is not to talk about her sexual experience
or her sexual pleasure, but to create a visual image
for the boys to masturbate too. I mean, just like
what I learned from Glamour magazine in the nineties, women's
sexual self expression exists for the pleasure of men.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I was just talking to one of my editors about Glamour.
I was working on a piece about Britney Spears and hair,
the politics of hair, because she talks in her new
book about thrashing her hair and when she shaved her
head and how it made her ugly and for the
first time in her life she was not sexualized. But
we were talking about remembering some of those sex tips
(15:39):
that we learned from magazines like Glamour, where they would
tell you to use your hair during the sex act
like either twirlet or like you know, run it down
a guy's chest or something, which is just so hilarious
to think about now, But back then we didn't have
the knowledge or experience to note that that was anything
but a weird thing head made up.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
I mean, I guess, like, if you're into that, go
for it.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
But the brushing of the hair, like your partner's body
might respond well to the sensation of your hair brushing
against them until the right circumstances, is not the same
as like play with your hair, perform your hair area
for the other person to witness.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
This is one of the things that I find so
refreshing about your work is that you take these commonly
held assumptions or things that we have heard, and then
you basically debunk them or unravel them to reveal what
is actually going on.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
It's one of the reasons why even now, when I
have lots of different channels for viewing pop culture, kind
of don't watch a lot of it because when it
involves sex, like, the thing goes off in my head
and I have to be like that it has not
how that works.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Yeah, it's like we need the annotations from you while
we are watching the thing.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, like, ps, this is fine. And also just know
that it's actually really rare for a person to be
able to go instantaneously from being very stressed out to
feeling very turned on. For most people, that's not how
it works.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
What are the things that you remember consuming in the
nineties that made you think twice or as an adult
you realize that that's actually not an accurate representation.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
There's something about Mary.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Oh Jesus, what bothered you about that one?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah? So the thing from There's Something about Mary is
that Cameron Diaz uses ejaculate that is dangling off of
She's like, oh, it's hair gel, and she puts it
in her hair. Yeah, anyone who is actually touched, touched
any ejaculate knows that it just does not bear any
(17:59):
relationships the texture of hair gel. Like it's a silly idea,
but as a nerd, I just find it totally unbelievable
and it reflects negatively on the intelligence of Cameron Diaz's
character that she could possibly mistake the texture of ejaculate
(18:21):
for the texture of hair gel. And also can she
not smell it? Like, it doesn't smell like hairjel. There's
no hair gel. It is ejaculate scented fresh scent. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Wait, you mentioned Eugene Levy earlier.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Do you have some fun fact about Eugene Levy in
American Pie?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well, so, from what I've heard, he was initially not
very interested in playing the father, and he worked with
them pretty intensively to shape the character into what like
a father might actually do. And I love the way
as a dat he does not play into like, yeah, son,
go get as much of that blussy as you can get.
(19:03):
But he also doesn't dismiss his son sexuality. He wants
to protect him from the inevitable embarrassments of being a
teenage boy, like, we'll just have to tell your mother
we ate the whole thing, and like brings him porn, which,
you know what for the mid nineties, fairly progressive to be.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Like here, yeah, here it is.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
This is a normal part of life.
Speaker 4 (19:29):
This is hustler, and this is a much more exotic magazine.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Are there common sex myths that you still come across today?
I don't think are you teaching at the moment, but
I know that you are generally teaching, and so I'm
sure that this comes up in class.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Yeah. So, Over the last few since the pandemic, in particular,
I have spent more time training professionals, training therapists, and
it is sometimes distressing how many of the same misunderstandings
and myths stay in their minds as I meet within
(20:05):
college students. Several years ago, I talked to a woman
who was recently out of college. She came to a
talk and she said, so, this thing I learned in
high school was that if you masturbate, if you teach
yourself how to have an orgasm by yourself, you won't
be able to have an orgasm with a partner. And
she's like a full grown adult and is asking this question.
(20:27):
I was like, yeah, it's the opposite of true. Actually,
if as a young person you learn how orgasm works
in your body, that means you know how orgasm works
in your body, so that when you're with another person,
which is a much more complex situation where part of
your brain might be tuned into what's happening in your body,
but part of your brain is also tuned in to
what's going on for your partner, and so HM, with
(20:49):
your attention split like that, it's actually more difficult to
focus on pleasure and let your body have an orgasm.
So it's great if you've already got the groundwork laid,
so to speak, for knowing like what the path is
to get to orgasm in your body, then you can
teach your partner how to follow that path. Okay, And
(21:10):
I got asked almost exactly the same question by a
therapist and a training five years later.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Was this a sex therapist?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
No?
Speaker 3 (21:18):
No, no, no no, So this is like marriage and
family therapist, couples therapists like it makes you feel slightly
about her, but like you do worry?
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Right, are there other things that you remember consuming in
the nineties. I think you mentioned the X files.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
So probably one of the very best episodes of The
X Files is Small Potatoes, which is an episode about
a shape shifter. Sunday got in all New X Files.
How do you find someone?
Speaker 1 (21:50):
We're looking for a man who can appear to be
his own father or anyone else.
Speaker 3 (21:54):
Who can transform him. So is everything okay into anyone
who these days would be called an in cell okay,
except that he was not celibate because he would shape
shift into the forms of more attractive men who had partners,
and he would have sex with them the women and
(22:14):
he got found out because they were having babies with tails.
Now this is actually, on reflection, a story of serial rapist,
and it is treated as comedy, right, I mean it's.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
A farce, right right right In the nineties when I.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Watched it, I just all all I focused on was
the comedy because that is how they framed it. And
in retrospect, uh like, actually violent sexual perpetrator yikes.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Right right, I mean there's so many examples of that, right,
Like if you look back, we just did an episode
on Dawson's Creek.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Which I have never seen.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I mean, it's a terrible more power to you like
it wasn't great, then it's not great on rewatch, so
I know there are a lot of fans and I
did watch it. But there's this one storyline where Pacey,
who is the off lead character, he's the best friend
of Dawson, who the show is named after, begins a
relationship with and loses his virginity to his English teacher
(23:19):
and oh right, yeah, grown woman, and it's just portrayed
as super hot, and I remember as a teenager being like, oh,
I want to see what happens with this relationship, like
that's so hot, and obviously in retrospect that was a
statutory rape, right, So.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Many portrayals like that.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
But I was even thinking back to just like basic
things that I internalized in high school that it took
me years to realize we're not true. So I just learned,
I think in the last six months from Twitter. Thanks Twitter,
I guess that blue balls are not real. When did
(23:56):
you just learn this, like five seconds ago? Oh and
I'm married to a man.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
And he was like, Babe, like, yeah, of course they're
not really, it's so here And I was like, uh wait,
what I.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Would be interested if you could find out where you
learned it, because I don't remember where I learned of
it either.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
I mean maybe just like people talking about it or
like being in sexual contexts where you but I don't
even think some a guy would have said it. I
think it was like, oh, we all knew that, like
it was going to be so so painful for a
man if you somehow aroused them and then didn't finish it.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So again, I had the good fortune of being trained
as a sex educator even before I started being sexual myself,
and I explicitly remember being told that, like some guys
will try to use this narrative of blue balls as
justification for trying to persuade a partner. No, they have
to continue doing a thing or else harm will come
to them. And so like the deal is, no. Can
(25:03):
it be uncomfortable to be aroused for a very long
time and not have an orgasm? Yeah, there's a reason
why those vagerate commercials say if your erection lasts more
than four hours, seek medical help, because it can be
really uncomfortable. Nothing bad happens to you, there's nothing dangerous
about it. It's a little bit like getting a Charlie horse.
(25:26):
So it's not real comfortable. But the underlying narrative behind
it is that boys have a sexual imperative, a need,
and because it's a biological need, they are entitled to
have that need met or else something bad could happen
to them. This is a narrative that has been in
place for very long time. If you go back and
(25:48):
read sex manuals from the late eighteen hundred of the
late nineteenth century, you'll begin to see the split between
the people who say, then have a biological need for
sexual release, and they use that as an argument in
favor of legalizing prostitution as a matter of fact, in
(26:09):
order to spare all these men's wives having to have
all the sex that men need or else. And then
you have on the other side, right at the turn
of the century, you begin to hear from sex educators
who are like, it is not a biological need, nothing
bad happens to men if they don't have any sort
of sexual release. Men just need to learn how to
(26:30):
control themselves, and they use it as an argument in
favor of abstinence only.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Until marriage, right right, right right.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
And you do kind of look back and wish that
either side could have found something better to do with
their time. So biologically it is not a need. I
don't think that that's an argument in favor of abstinence
only before marriage. So if you've read Girls by Peggy Ornstein,
her book Girls and her book Boys are both raw.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Dropping girls and sex, Girls and.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Sex and boys and sex, Thank you very much. One
story that I remember from Girls is from a teenager
that she interviewed who said, this guy came over to
my house and we were making out and that was
sort of all I wanted to do, but he wanted
to have sex, and so like I gave him a
blowjob so that he would leave my house. Yeah, And
(27:22):
on the one hand, like, hooray for survival strategies, hooray
for finding a way out of that situation where she
was not putting herself in the path of physical harm,
which is a potential thing.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Did she feel in danger were she to leave or
did she.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
She felt like she had no other way to get
him to leave the house. She wanted him to go.
He kept saying, no, I wasn't gonna go. He wanted
to have sex, all come on, all that stuff, Like
the only way to get him out of the house
was to give him something. But on the other hand,
like that's that's like deeply not okay, and none of
us would want a daughter of our own to be
(27:59):
in the situation.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
I mean, that reminds me of another lesson that I
think I learned and internalized as a teenager, which was
no does not mean no, No means convince me. And
the number of times that played out, and I think,
you know, I think that that was very prominent in
like teen films at that time, like even It's Super Bad.
(28:21):
I think the guys there are talking about, you know,
if you if you get here.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Drunk enough, she'll she'll say yes.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
But another one of those lessons, I guess I'm curious
how much of your work is almost about re education,
like re educating us on how things actually work after
years and years and years of being misinformed.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Ninety eight point nine percent of my work is simply
like that thing you learned before, that's not true. I
understand why you believed it. It was the thing you
were taught, and why wouldn't you believe the thing that
you were taught. So some of the things are about facts,
like blue balls. That's just like a biological reality. Is
that no tissue damn which occurs to a human in
the absence of sexual release, right, Like, that's just a
(29:05):
fact when it comes to things like no means no, yeah,
And if you have sex with someone who's drunk, that's
sexual assault. That's like a cultural relearning where you're shifting
people's norms, even people's morals, in their understanding of what
it means to be a sexual person, how to be
a good sexual partner. And ultimately it's deconstructing this gender binary, right,
(29:33):
like rejecting the whole idea that like men have one
sexual script and women have another sexual script, and those
are the only sexual scripts that exist, and you have
to follow the one that you've been given. And there
is a complexity here because on the one hand, no
means no, and having sex with a drug person is assault,
and because the script for girls is that you're not
(29:55):
allowed to initiate even though you're supposed to really enjoy
sex and you're supposed to you have a great time
when you have sex, and you're supposed to be a
sexual person who is good at the sex, you also
are supposed to not want sex. You're not supposed to
initiate sex, and you were not supposed to say yes
because wanting it and liking it are not very feminine.
(30:18):
We have both of these competing scripts simultaneously. And so
for a long time, girls in real life who are
exploring their sexuality, trying to find out what it is
they want in life didn't feel cultural permission to go
ahead and say yes to the things that they wanted
and liked, right, And so maybe they would say no
(30:38):
and do things that they wanted to do, but they
were saying the no they felt they were supposed to say. Like,
I think there has been a complexity and a grayness,
Like there's been controversy over the Christmas song Baby It's
called outside, Yeah Yeah, where like she's saying no, but
she's saying no because she feels like she's not allowed
(30:59):
to say yes, and she actually like really wants to
say yes.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yep, yep. Wait, what are the lyrics?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
I really can't stay it's cold outside. I gotta go away.
It's cold outside. This evening has been so very nice
and warm. I ought to.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Say no, no you at least I'm gonna say that.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I wait, but it's cold outside. She sings it too,
but it's cold outside, So there's ambiguity.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
You're describing cultural scripts which of course are an important
part of this. But it's almost as if the more
factual things you're discussing, the things that we learned in
the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Get talked about less.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Yes, in reading your book, Come as you are, I
was so struck by how many basic facts I was
learning for the first time or relearning for the first time.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
And so while you think that those would be easy.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Things to reteach or correct, it's almost as if we're
talking about, you know, the patriarchy and cultural scripts and
what consent means much more often than we're talking about
these literal facts.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Yes, literal actual just biological facts about the lack of
correlation between how your genitals are behaving and how you
personally feel.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Are there a few basic facts that I should have
you debunk for us right here while we have you like,
what are the most caught What are the things we
need to know?
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Can we start with virginity since we were talking about
American pie Whease virginity is not it's not a biological thing,
biological fact of any kind. It cannot be like, what
the heck? What the heck is virginity?
Speaker 2 (32:57):
The idea of the cherry.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
And in biolog turns the hymen. The hymen is a
fold of tissue. It is like all of our tissues.
If it gets damaged, it heals. Hymen can be stretched.
But there are people who have given birth who have
intact hymens. My husband laughingly calls it a freshness seal,
(33:21):
like just that whole thing, all of it derives from
several hundred years ago, medieval biologists medical practitioners looking at
a fold of skin sort of over the mouth of
a vagina and deciding because they live in a culture
where a woman's body is literally a man's property, and
(33:44):
her lack of having had a penis in her vagina
yet matters insofar as a man wants his property to
be in good condition. He wants not to invest his
resources in raising someone else's offspring. And like you never
can fully get can control over a woman's sexuality, but like,
at least that fold of skin is some assurance that
(34:06):
that vagina is fresh, right with all biological nonsense, because
you can't tell based on the presence of absence of
a hymen whether not anybody has ever had anything put
into their vagina before.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Okay, so that's virginity. Yeah, what's another common one.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Blue balls, of course, would definitely go on the list
of like this. This is not a thing attached to it.
The idea of sex as a biological drive, like hunger
is a drive. If you don't have adequate energy intake,
you can literally die. First biological drive. If you have
inadequate balance of water and sodium, you can literally die.
Sleep is a drive. If you do not get adequate sleep,
(34:45):
you can literally die. Sex is not one of those.
Sex is an incentive motivation system. And no, I'm not
under a delusion that we're all gonna stop saying the
simple and easy sex drive and start saying sexual incentive
motivation system. But if we could all just get real
clear that we do not mean that sex is a
biological need without which anybody will die, that would be
(35:06):
super good.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Is there one sex myth that if you could just
do one thing and eradicate it?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Can I choose a cluster of myths around what I'm
going to colloquially call women's orgasm? Please, So the research
here's my gender caveat. Virtually all the research on women's
orgasms is done on cisgender women. So I see no
reason why all of this doesn't apply to anyone who's
a woman, but know that the research is talking about
(35:38):
sisgender women.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
That's the caveat yep.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
First of all, as I said, only about ten ish
percent of women who masturbate do so with any kind
of vaginal penetration. That's been shown in study after study
after study for the last fifty years. Only a quarter
to like maybe a third of women are reliably orgasmic
from vaginal penetration alone, or as it's called in the research,
(36:03):
unassisted intercourse, one of my favorite technical terms. The remaining
two thirds to three quarters are sometimes rarely or never
orgasmic from vaginal stimulation alone. And the only reason why
I still get asked like, how do I have an
orgasm during sex? Is the way people say it. They
(36:23):
mean during penal vaginal intercourse. How come I'm not having them?
The reason you're not having them is because approximately two
thirds to three quarters of people with vaginas, that's not
a very good way for them to get the kind
of stimulation they need to get to orgasm because the
vagina is pretty far away from the glitterists, which is
for most people, not all, but for most people, the
(36:45):
most efficient path to getting to orgasm and The only
reason people still care about this is because I think
of freakin' freckin' Freud, whose influence on psychotherapy will not die.
Saying that clteral orgasms are immature and vaginal orgasms are mature.
That is an extremely convenient line for the patriarchy and
(37:08):
the misogyny, and a world in which men would really
benefit from women being orgasmic, from the kind of behavior
by which heterosexual men are very reliably orgasmic.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
It's so interesting, though, because, Okay, for people who haven't
studied fraud, these myths persist, Like why do they, I mean,
besides the patriarchy, why do they persist?
Speaker 3 (37:33):
Sex is a big deal, and women's bodies in the
world of the gender binary have to be controlled because
a whole lot of the genetic destiny of our species
happens inside of uteruses, and so we have to control
the uteruses, which means we have to control the women,
(37:56):
which means not only making laws about it, but havingultural
narratives about right and wrong, about beautiful and ugly, about
disgusting and perfect that train us all to be good
from very young, to be good at being the right
kind of sexual person.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
And what about the role of pop culture to perpetuate
or to teach us healthy sexual habits.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Yeah, because pop culture is so powerful, because these narratives
form our framework for understanding how our own sexuality works.
And I say that as someone who even though I
have like all this education and all this experience, I
still find myself falling into the same self critical traps
(38:46):
of comparing my sexuality to other people's sexuality, or to
like the cultural narrative of how sexuality works. Like now,
as a perimount apausal forty something lady married to somebody,
when my sexual desire isn't like when the spark isn't
still alive in my marriage, I think, oh no, there's
something terribly wrong. And like I wrote a whole book
(39:06):
about how oh no, nothing is terribly wrong, Like I
know exactly how to fix it, and I still my
first response is still to a panic that I'm doing
it wrong, that I'm broken, that I'm an inadequate wife.
So I think it clearly is very powerful. It embeds
narratives in our head of how sex is supposed to work.
And only by having an enormously diverse range of stories,
(39:30):
only by having a whole lot of different narratives about
ways that you can be sexual and do sex? Right,
do we get a liberating pop culture narrative? Is when
there's dozens of them? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah? Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (39:47):
I like had a lot of feelings and then words happened,
and I don't know that any of them formed sentences.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
No, that's amazing, But.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
I really meant it.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Is there anything out there you think does it well.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Of mainstream pop culture? I would be really interested to
hear from listeners like, what have you seen that you
feel like does a good job of representing sexuality in
a way where it shows a world that you would
want your kids to grow up in or that you
wish you had grown up in. One of the episodes
in the podcast that I made with Pushkin was on
(40:22):
Ted Lasso.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
They picked it because it's one of the few shows
that I watch, and I feel like that show did
a pretty darn good job of sexuality. I feel like
it was extremely silly in its relationships, but the sexual relationships,
such the little bit that they showed, were pretty great. Actually,
like the communication was on point. The equality of different
(40:46):
people to be able to initiate sex and say no
to sex was really good, but there just wasn't a
lot of sex in it.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's actually a perfect place to
end it with the call out to our listeners posed
by you.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, so I can know, like when somebody asks me,
but what can I watch that's good, that I'll be
able to be like, here's a.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
List Before I let you go, Could you say a
few words about the new book.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Oh sure, it's called Come Together. I was very proud
when I thought of that title, because it is about
how couples sustain a sexual connection over the long term,
couples of all combinations and all structures, whether monogamous or not.
It comes from the fact that writing and promoting Come
as you Are diminished my interest in sex to less
(41:34):
than zero. And when I got done with that project,
which you'd think writing and thinking and talking about sex
all the time might make it easier, turns out no,
I had zero interest for like months at a time.
So when that was over, I started looking at the research,
of course, because that's what I do, on how couples
do sustain a strong sexual connection over the long term,
(41:55):
And what I learned changed my own sex life, and
I wrote a book about it to help other people
in a similar situation.
Speaker 4 (42:04):
This Is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 5 (42:07):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 5 (42:28):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books
Feminist Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media.
Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Jaron
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 5 (42:51):
Our executive producer from the Media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producer from iHeart are Anna Stump and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Our artwork is from Pentagram.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Additional editing helps from Mary Do Sound correction and mastering
by Amanda Rose Smith.
Speaker 4 (43:05):
We are your hosts, Susie Bannoncarum.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even
more check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.
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