The Sex Chat No Woman Wants To Have

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to Amma Mia podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters
that this podcast is recorded on. Welcome to Mumma out Loud,
where women come to debrief. I am Jessie Stephens.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
I'm Mia Friedman and I'm Amelia Lester.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
And here's what is on our agenda for today, Wednesday,
the ninth of July. More women than ever are having
caesareans in New South Wales. Have women been scared shitless when.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
It comes to birth?

Speaker 1 (00:40):
And there's a very well known little blue pill that
is often used for a rectile dysfunction, which is something
that you want to talk about in the first thirty
seconds of a podcast, and it's causing the gap, the
sex gap between men and women to really widen.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
And then we're going to talk about whether anyone should
even be going to university anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Plus some scroller's gossip about Jennifer Aniston and some news
from beck Jad.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
But in case you missed it, everything you thought you
knew about activewear is there is a big cultural change
of foot and I for one am here for it.
Out with the soulless monochrome sets, you know, with the
little bralette and the leggings all active where seems to
be black, not even gray, but like that burgundy color
yes and mushroom yes in with lurid colored, sweat drenched cotton.

(01:30):
Allow me to explain, this is the revenge of y
two k athleisure. The chase makers of Line have decrete it.
They are buying up secondhand separates from the early two
thousand second hand workout separates.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
So, okay, so you sent this link to me in
the early house of this morning.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
It was the first thing I read, and I loved it.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
It was literally the first thing I saw when I
turned my phone on, and I sent you back a
vomit emoji because the idea, like, I know, Jesse, you're
not buying anything near this year, and you love a thrift,
and I'm becoming more partial to thrifting. I have to say,
but secondhand active wear?

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Can we just define our terms here? Okay?

Speaker 4 (02:08):
So what we mean by early two thousands active wear?
I want you to think of like a bright red
and Nike tank top, a pink pleated tennis skirt. Remember
those Kiki capris that were everywhere in like two thousand
and three?

Speaker 1 (02:21):
What about the g string leotards we used to wear
over our leggings.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
No, that's too far back, too far back there. And
there are several reasons why this is happening, and I
learned about them in the excellent fashion Substack Never Warns.
Do you subscribe to that? By Leanna sat Saturnstein. She
used to write a vogue and now she's got a substack.
The first is because they just don't make them how
they used to. I know you've talked about this on
the show, this idea that clothing is part of the

(02:46):
end shitification of our lives. Everything is getting shittier, and
workout leggings are absolutely part of that trend.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
They're also more expensive, Like they're so expensive, it's like
two hundred dollars and they're shinier.

Speaker 4 (02:57):
Have you noticed that, Yeah, because they're making them from
ever more nefarious synthetic ones. The second reason is that
it's about rejecting this idea of looking neat and pulled together,
you know how like Quiet Life Stream meant we always
had to be in our tasteful, grayish separates.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
I have never worn a matching set, and so I
am all for the end of the matching set. The
fact that you would have a matching set, which is
going to set you back five hundred dollars, and then
b you're gonna find both pieces to wear them with
socks that match. It's just I mean, I'm in awe
of any woman who can do that.

Speaker 4 (03:30):
And also, inevitably they spotlight the particular part of my
lower stomach that I'm not looking to spotlight.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
So it's not so much about what you're saying is
it's not so much about buying someone's old, used, no
crotch sweated leggings that have been up Jesse's cameltoe. It's
more about vintage vintage.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
It's an aesthetic.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
It's like it's giving Gwyneth leaving Tracy Anderson in two thousand.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
And four, remember that.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
And that was that kind of like jazz, A size
inspired like rolled down track soup pam oh yes, a
sort of frilly sports bra, mesh cutouts. Remember all of this.
We used to have fun with, okay, And I think
the reason why we went down this path of really boring,
really tasteful athleisure is because we started wearing it everywhere,

(04:19):
and it was a way of convincing ourselves that it
was okay to wear our leggings to the supermarket, day
to night leggings. That was a thing in the twenty tenth.
Don't tell me that wasn't a thing.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
And now we've.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
Realized, actually, we should probably just be wearing them to
work out, and we may as well have fun with it.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
I am all for athleisure coming back that it's not
skin time. I quite like that. But I will also
fight for buying secondhand athleisua. I do it all the time.
I go into thrift shops and I go tops bottoms,
tipraws all the time, all the time. I wouldn't think
twice about it.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
This is the most fashionable you have ever been.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
I know I was ahead. I was ahead. According to
an article in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend,
almost sixty percent of births at some Sydney private hospitals
are by caesarean as more women seek to cont troll childbirth.
Mary Ward writes that this comes within the context of
increased discussions around traumatic experiences of labor. At first, one

(05:19):
might think, okay, first thing I thought was maternal age.
So we know that maternal age is going up, and
with increased maternal age comes the increased likelihood of a cesarean.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
So it's sixty percent in some of these private hospitals
in Sydney. What's the average sort.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Of across the car in three, so it's closer to
thirty percent. Yeah, yeah, more double yeah exactly. And look,
the maternal age does not fully explain the trend. A
recent report found that it is elective, not emergency sea sections,
that are driving the trend, and concerns have been raised
about private obstetricians pushing women towards getting a sea section

(05:59):
for the convenience of the obstetrician because obviously they can
then schedule it and they can go all right, I
know that ol be here. I know that they'll be
a bed. I know I can staff for that.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
And this isn't entirely knew, is it? Because I remember
the phrase too posh to push was thrown around I
don't know, ten fifteen years ago about the idea of
elective C sections. And I don't know if I've imagined this,
but I think, actually posh Spice, it might have come
around when she said she was having an elective cesarean.

(06:29):
This phrase too posh to push started to be thrown around.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
I mean I detest that phrase because I used to
post the podcast The Delivery Room and Hello Bump, where
I spoke to a lot of people about their birth stories.
And there is nothing posh or easy about a cesarean,
and any woman who's had one will know.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
That there's no Let's just get that clear, and we
should say at the start of this segment, we have
no judgment. However, your baby comes into the world through
the sun, ruth, through the garage, through adoption, through a surrogate.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
You do you know you also have zero medical expertise.

Speaker 4 (07:07):
And I'm not.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Looking to.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Exactly but what's actually interesting what you're saying about the
Tuposh to push is that I read this fascinating article
in The Guardian about Brazil and cesarean rates. So they
have the highest in the world right and there are
some private hospitals in Brazil whether rates are as close
to ninety nine percent. Across the population is about fifty
seven percent. But there is actually this almost class distinction

(07:32):
in Brazil where they understand it as sea sections are
modern and elegant, and this whole article was about c
sections as status symbol. The author wrote, natural birth is
something poor women are meant to endure, and I wondered
if reading this just about the distinction between private and public,
I kind of went, oh, is this indicative of a
broader cultural trend where we go the poor women will

(07:55):
have the long natural poor women.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
Can we pause on that?

Speaker 4 (07:58):
Yeah, because I think that's part of what's going on
here as well. I remember when I was pregnant with
my first child, I got in an elevator and there
was a woman in the elevator who I hadn't met before.
We were just people writing an elevator together, and she
turned to me and she said, are you going.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
To have a natural birth?

Speaker 4 (08:15):
I didn't even understand what she meant, and then once
it dawned on me that she actually did mean a
vaginal birth, I thought, how crazy is it that we
are still categorizing some births as natural and some as
presumably unnatural.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
And this idea that you.

Speaker 4 (08:32):
Can plan out how your birth is going to go
is I think part of the issue.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
Or that it's any of their business how you're going
to do it.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Isn't it about this increasing move towards Bertha's identity?

Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yes and no, right? Because there was an inquiry in
New South Wales last year that I think is a
piece of this puzzle, and it was an inquiry into
birth trauma. It was the largest of its kind and
thousands of women spoke about what had happened to them.
And you couldn't listen to that or read some of
those accounts and not be deeply moved and troubled by
what some women have experienced in hospitals. And I reckon
that it's having the result of doing two things. The

(09:06):
first is people going I want to take the medication
of childbirth out of it. I want to go home
and I want to have a midwife come to my
home and do it. And I totally understand how you're
getting to that position. And the other one is I
want full control. I don't want this forty eight hour
labor with tears and stitches could start at any time,
and exactly right, I don't want that. And so I

(09:29):
can see that people are going both ways. Do you
see birth trauma as being a big part of this
story here?

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Have we so many thoughts about this, and again not
minimizing what anyone wants to call anything that's happened to them,
but I think that the use of the word trauma
now that sort of permeates every negative experience. Makes this
a really difficult conversation to have because there are very
few women who would say my birth was great. My

(10:01):
second birth, I would say was traumatic. When you look
at it on paper. Nothing terrible happened except that I
really wanted pain medication and there was no it needs
just available, so I wasn't able to have it. I
delivered vaginally, everything was fine. I felt very traumatized because
the birth that I thought I was going to have,
which was that I would get drugs like I did

(10:21):
with my first and my third, that didn't happen. I
nearly had a cesarean the third time, an elective cesarean
because I was so I'll say traumatized. But you can't
compare what happened to me to someone who had a
still birth, someone who had an emergency cesarean. You know,
I've got friends who had truly medically traumatic berths.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I don't think that trauma is about comparison or grading
it though, like I think there's space for acknowledged.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
Leg it would be on the bottom of the leaderboard.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
But even so, I think that there are so many women,
not just now, but throughout history. I'm sure that my grandmother,
who had seven babies, would have experienced birth trauma. There
was no language for it. It was something no one
cared about. She just disappeared and came back with another baby.
You know, she lived with complications that no one ever
cared about.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
And isn't it great that we are now so much
more open and able to share our experiences about something
that until as recently as twenty twenty five years ago,
a lot of the time, male partners were not even
coming into the room for birth. It was regarded as
so secret and so shameful in itself, and I think
it's great that we're opening up discussion about that. That said, Mia,

(11:33):
you mentioned that part of the reason why your second
birth was traumatic or was it experience as trauma, was
because it didn't live up to your expectations. I worry
that in fetishizing birth stories, we are teaching women who
have never been through this before that it is something
that they can control, or that they can narrativevise, that

(11:54):
they can turn into a neat story, when often it
isn't that way, and often we don't have any control
over it. Jesse, I know you really love birth stories.
Can you explain to me why.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Obsessed with birth stories? I listen to them all the time,
and I think I am in awe of women. I'm
in awe of what we endure and go through. And
the thing about birth is that there are so many
twists and turns, like there are so many plot points
to people's birth stories, and no two are ever the same.
And I can say that as someone who has listened

(12:25):
to thousands like it blows my mind what women go through.
And I do think that there's utility in it. Like
I immersed myself in education, I was kind of the
millennial test case of do you think that was helpful?

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (12:39):
And aren't you by immersing yourself in birth stories, aren't
you again sort of already projecting what your birth story
is going to be, how you're going to narrativize it,
when in reality it's not a story.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, I don't even mean content that you post about it,
but just like we think of everything that happens to
us as content or narratives.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
And you can't help but therefore set up certain expectations
about how it's going to go.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
I felt prepared, I felt I did somewhat know what
to expect. I felt likege I knew what I was
in and I had what I now look back on
as a great birth. And I think and I had
people say this to me. When I was pregnant, I
had an absolute pathological fear of childbirth that I actually
had to speak to a psychologist about because I'm so scared.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Okay Stoley right there? Connected do you think.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Well, isn't it funny that when I was pregnant and
I immersed myself in all the stuff, I came out
less scared.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
But you just said, when you were pregnant, you were
pathologically scared. You also were pretty depressed. But we don't
know what that's relating to. But what impact do you
think looking back now knowing all of that, Like the
Internet almost gives us too much access to too much information.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Yeah, And I was told this by a lot of
women during pregnancy. They said, you don't listen to the
whole positive birth story, like in terms of the person
on TikTok telling it, like, we are attracted to the negative,
scary stories. And when I realized that, I really appreciated
people during pregnancy telling me their positive ones. And I
really think that we should tell more and more positive
ones because most of them. I had a midwife say
to me, the standard birth would make terrible television and

(14:09):
a terrible movie, because the standard birth is actually a
lot of boring sitting around.

Speaker 4 (14:14):
Okay, but I'm going to say something controversial. You said
it taught you what to expect. Well, maybe it shouldn't have,
because you can't know what to expect and the idea
that you Okay, the more preparation I do, the better
prepared I will be. There is no preparation that you
can do for a.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Lot of birth outcomes.

Speaker 1 (14:33):
And you would have had the same birth if you
were prepared or not.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
I felt like I had strategies, and I don't mean
like necessarily like a fool proof, but for each stage
I felt like whether it was breathing or whether it
was a tens machine, I felt as though the information
and the knowledge was power for me in that instance,
I really did.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
You had it gave you some aspect of control?

Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, And what I would say about this because then
maybe the reason I'm interested in it is that I
was the woman who went to my obstetrician and said,
all right, electivecy section, it's what I want look me
in and why.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Did you do that?

Speaker 1 (15:08):
Because I was terrified.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
Yeah, and I definitely have a thing about control and pain.
I knew that I had a past trauma involving pain,
and I had very sound psychological reason why the elective
sea section would be best for me. And very gently,
this obsetrician said, I've been doing this for a long time,
think about it. If you want your elective sea section
at eight months, absolutely we're going to go for it.

(15:30):
But just think about it. And this is so specific
to me. This is not a tale that I am
telling so that other people do it. But I'm really
glad that I gave the vaginal option a go and
that went well for me. My sister did the same thing.
She ended up with birth trauma. You absolutely can't control it.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
So don't you think it's all about hindsight, not about
whatever you do, like you get what you get.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
What I do think is worth acknowledging is that elective
sea sections. And I find it in some of the
rhetoric and how people talk about it is just never
the easy way out. Like I know a lot of yeah,
who the idea that by doing it vaginally it's harder
and more unpredictable people. I know, I've had really really
hard this idea of a binary, that there's one where

(16:14):
you're more in control and where you have your proper
date and all of that. I think that's a false binary.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
I reject the idea that one is morally superior, or
makes you more of a woman, or is a preferred experience.
I find that the one as natural and one.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
As and if this is a corrective to listening to
what women want, great, I think that that's probably been
missing since the beginning of time.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
We just have to hope now that.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
I mean, you pointed out that this is a class
based phenomenon in some ways. So yeah, people are now
listening to a certain segment of women who want what
they want, but it will be said that to others.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
I wonder also, how much of it do you think
is that we have absolutely no tolerance for unpredictability anymore.
For example, if my phone rings and it's an unknown number, firstly,
I'm shocked that my phone's wrung because who would ring me?
And secondly, I'm not going to answer it. I don't
know who's there. I need to control that. It's the

(17:09):
same reason I wouldn't just ring either of you. I
text you to say, can I ring you so that
the ringing wasn't a surprise?

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Is it about our tolerance or is it because we
suddenly can Like I wonder if this option was afforded
to women one hundred years ago.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Everything I want to watch is on demand, everything I
want to listen to is on demand. There is no
one predictability in our life. We can find out if
we're having a boy or a girl, we can name
the baby before, we can have a party. We can
do all of those things. So the idea of just
when might the baby come? Who knows? How might the
baby come?

Speaker 3 (17:41):
Who knows?

Speaker 2 (17:42):
Filth countercultural.

Speaker 4 (17:43):
And I think that when you say that, I think
there's an element there of sort of judging people wanting
to get under their control.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
Oh no, not at all.

Speaker 4 (17:52):
I would probably be the same, right, okay, because no
judgment to the not the judgment that you are conveying.
But the judgment around GLP ones is similar. It's like
you're not wasting the natural way now, you're taking a.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
Bit easy way out. It feels like a very similar discourse.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
And people used to say that, yeah, about weight loss
surgery as well, and there was all this digma, and
people didn't want to say that they'd had it because
it was the idea that you've done it the easy way.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
And maybe to Jesse's point, it's just that it's available
now when it wasn't available before.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
In a moment, the sex gap that explains why so
many women are keeping their legs crossed while men are
dry humping. It's the dream of every woman to talk
about sex with her boomer mother, and this week a
journalist called Hannah Pitard lived that dream and wrote an
article about it for New York Magazine, who was having
a conversation with her mother. They were both divorced at

(18:49):
this point and they were both dating, so they were
just talking about sex, and her mother, who's sixty eight,
opened her eyes to this whole issue among older women
who were dating men who use they're called sexuo pharmaceuticals.
It's the category of drug made famous by Viagra.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
That addresses like a rectail that's funk correct erecti dysfunction.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
And her mother was complaining that when you're dating men
around that age, a lot of them use these drugs,
and the problem is that what it does. I didn't
realize this but it doesn't guarantee an actual orgasm or
an ejaculation. But what it does do is create an

(19:32):
erection that can last for a really, really long time.
So the average time for male ejaculation during vaginal sex
is three to seven minutes, but when you have one
of these sexio pharmaceuticals, it can take twenty five to
thirty minutes or more and it might never end.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
In a conclusion, I also read that when it does end,
the time between when it ends and when you're ready
to go again shortens. So for people it means that
you know if yes, you want to keep going on.

Speaker 4 (20:00):
I just wish that people listening to the podcast not
watching it could have seen Jesse's Well, yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
So I once did an in of you with a sexpert,
an author called Tracy Cox, that is her real name,
and she was talking about how a lot of couples
become sexually incompatible as they get older because women aging
causes their libido to drop, and naturally, men aging causes
their erections to be not as hard and for them

(20:30):
to not be able to last as long. And because
also women experience vaginal dryness as they get old, it's
another symptom of perimenopause and menopause. That was kind of
nature's way of making them stay sexually compatible.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Behinding them both down a little.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
Bit, exactly winding them both down. But now there is
this medication that can change the way men have sex,
but not women. And interestingly, when you look at in
this article, she talked about her mother complaining that there
are all these men who have their pills and want

(21:05):
to go for it, and all these women who are
getting terrible chafing or who were just like that, I
want to go for half an hour because vaginal lubrication
occurs during arousal, but water based lubricants typically need to
be reapplied every five to fifteen minutes. Yeah, it's really
causing problems both in couples and in people dating. What

(21:27):
do you think.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
I find it so so interesting because I think it
speaks more broadly. I was thinking about growing up and
how we would hear ads on the radio and I
can't even remember if they were for something specific, but
a rectil dysfunction was everywhere. It was you would think
it was life threatening, that it was one of the
biggest health issues of our time.

Speaker 1 (21:45):
There were billboards everywhere, which is funny.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Right, because a rectail dysfunction, I mean, sure it can
be an indictment on your health, but it's actually just
a symptom of aging, like in the same way that,
as you say, the female body changes, the male body changes.
And there was this research out after twenty twenty three
that said, in the four years before a rectail dysfunction,
funding was six times higher than that of endometriosis. So

(22:10):
the focus on making sure that men can you know,
and keep going, yeah, is so much higher than legitimate.
But women also like almost like vaginal lubrication is so
low on their list of health concerns that, as you say, maya,
they might get the lubrican or whatever, but it's just
more and more uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yeah, And it's more like lubricant. It just kind of
means that penetration is less uncomfortable. It doesn't actually make
you feel any sort of sexual pleasure.

Speaker 4 (22:38):
Okay, So I'm going to bring a different take to this.
It's interesting that yet again we're facing the idea of
science and technology kind of getting ahead of us and
figuring out what to do about that. It's not unlike
what we were saying about caesareans. If you want to
flip it around. Aren't you basically reprimanding men for not
having sex the natural way?

Speaker 1 (23:00):
No? No, it's more just identifying that it's been unequal
in terms of it takes two people to have heterosexual
penetrative sex, but we've interfered with the natural process for
only one of them.

Speaker 4 (23:14):
Yeah, And my hope is that eventually we'll get ways
in which women can catch up with them, right, rather
than sort of all of us giving up, we.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Should acknowledge as well, like there are increasingly, actually, with
the awareness of perimenopause and menopause, there are increasingly pharmaceuticals
on the market that address, you know, women's libido and
physical issues that they might have.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
They're not very widely known.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
I think that's important to know, right, So they're not
certainly not as widely popularized, maybe because of stigma about
women's like sexual desires.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
And also I think the way, from what I understand,
the way sexual arousal works in men is a little
more mechanical and in women it's a little bit more cerebral.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Is more sex always better?

Speaker 4 (23:55):
Like?

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Is there also just a stage? So I've read this
thing by an expert. It basically further an expert, because
that's important distinction. I thought at Tracy cos it was
a pharmaceutical person who was saying, and probably take it
with a grain of salt, because I don't know what
company she worked for, But basically it was saying, like,
sixty percent of sixty year old men need this kind
of stuff, seventy percent of seventy year old men, and

(24:16):
by the age of eighty most will need it in order.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
She also said forty percent of forty year old men.

Speaker 5 (24:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, like that's the kind of rule. And I'm just
thinking that are we treating this as an urgent health
concern without first asking the question if it is an
urgent health concern? And are we framing a problem and
then fixing it?

Speaker 3 (24:36):
I mean that is we've read countless accounts. I'm sure
you have.

Speaker 4 (24:40):
In fact, there was a great article in the New
York Times magazine last year which was about the sex
drive of older Americans and it was basically pulling together
this evidence that says old people do still want to
have sex. Retirement villagers and even nursing homes are full
of people having sex. Yeah, And it's just that we

(25:00):
choose not. We don't want to believe that it's uncomfortable
for us. It would be so much more comfortable for
us to think they have time to put it away.
Isn't it cu that they're in love or maybe they
also want to have sex?

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, and I should say, even in this New York
article called Little Blue Pill by Hannah Pittad, she did
talk to a lot of women who said, you know,
either in long term relationships or when they're dating, that
it can be a bit difficult at first when you
get used to it, and there's pros and there's cons.
But a lot of them have said that's been a
fantastic thing for their relationship because certainly, in the case

(25:33):
of complete and Rechtil dysfunction, they weren't able to have
penitive sex at all, and that was a problem within
those couples.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, but then I read in this article and then
in a few others examples of for example, there was
a woman who was saying that she's kind of fielding
off these unwanted advances driven by a partner's need to
get his money worth on the ten dollar pill. And
what happens is they take the pill, they have this
physical reaction, often in a completely different room to their
partner and then it's like all right, I'm ready, Yeah,

(26:01):
she's going.

Speaker 4 (26:02):
The timing is up to them because they have to
take the pill at a certain amount of time.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Before and even with dating, they were saying the pressure
when you go home with a guy and the guy's thinking, yeah,
taken now, because if I need to take it now,
and then when they take it now, there's this internalized
no matter what age you are as a woman that
when like even the blue balls myth, the idea that
if a man is ready, you owe it to him

(26:26):
to kind of service his needs and that he's.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
And then keep going until he finishes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, when this pounding, like this really aggressive sex that
maybe this lends itself to is not something that women
ever asked for.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
One woman says, full play is now her getting him
a glass of water so he can take his blue
palt and please, before you make any decisions about anything
really in your life to do with your body or
your mind, go and talk to a doctor. We are
not doctors.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Remember last week we were talking about transparency around cosmetic surgery. Specifically,
we're talking about the Kardashians and how they were spearheading
it and it seemed indicative of a broader cultural trend
that we're not gatekeeping, we're telling everyone all the work
we've had done. It seems that Bechjard really has her
finger on the pulse because she has entered the chat.

(27:17):
She has entered the chat. She is a model and
a TV presenter, and she just launched a new podcast
called vein Ish and it is all about cosmetic treatments
and beauty routines. Here's a little bit of what she
talks about on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
This is just me today.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
I've got fake tan on.

Speaker 5 (27:34):
I've got those false the stick on underlash lashes on.
I've got hair extensions sewed in. I used a prescription
lash serum this morning to make my eyelashes grow better,
but accidentally stuck it in my eye.

Speaker 3 (27:45):
And then I've got pink o.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
I've got a fresh set of shir like gel nails.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
I had in fizzline trays.

Speaker 5 (27:50):
I took them out and I replaced with a fifteen
minute teeth whitening session. I did infrared sauna this morning.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
I'm drinking my.

Speaker 5 (27:56):
Age Mate anti aging supplement after i had a breakfast
with super food porridge with my glutamine and collagen supplement smoothie.
I plucked out every single visible gray hair that I
could find. I use my prescription retino. I used my
hyaluronic HB five. I use my vitamin C serum. I
stuck my silicon nipple pads on. I overdrew my lips,

(28:17):
I contoured my face. I pulled my hair back in
a really tight pony to give myself a non surgical
browl if.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Well, it's on into this studio. She did all that
before seven thirty this morning.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
She's just a light.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
She actually has every right to look that good like that.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's a lot of work. Talk about labor. She didn't
talk a lot there, but not to say she won't.
But that was more about just what it took non surgically.
So get ready.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Their approach is, and this is a quote, no more gatekeeping.
We're getting real and putting our bodies and faces on
the line to help people feel more comfortable to be
themselves because we didn't wake up like this. And it
is about the cosmetic enhancements that they have felt shame about,
like that people haven't spoken about for a long time.
For a long time, bet Judd has been criticized or

(29:03):
scrutinized about what she has or hasn't had done.

Speaker 1 (29:05):
I was speaking to a.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Friend about this because I thought, oh, I feel exhausted,
like if I need to get a sperm facial, salmon
sperm facial, or a browlifter, a nose job. Am I
just is this kind of being normalized. And a friend
said to me, I'm finding it so refreshing because I
am sick of being told by beauty influencers that I

(29:27):
just need to buy this fifteen dollar moistizer. I would
far prefer Beckjudd sit there and go here's my long list.
I'm going to be completely honest and transparent with you
and then pick and choose, which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
It's like the credits at the end of a film.
You know, you went to a film and then you're like,
look how many people it took to make that film.
I've got some scarletous gossip about Jennifer Aniston.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Oh I love this.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
She turned fifty six a few months ago. That's not
the gossip.

Speaker 4 (29:54):
Though.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
She seems to have a new boyfriend and he's a hypnotist.

Speaker 4 (29:57):
A hypnotist like Andrew Garfield with the Witch.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
This is all real trend just as in he does hypnotis.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
I think maybe that's how she met him. So Jim
Curtis is reportedly in his early fifties, a little hard
to nail down his actual age. He's a hypnotist, a
transformational coach, and an author. You can go and look
him up on Instagram. I did. He's like a coach, right,
and so here's what he sounds like.

Speaker 6 (30:22):
How do I release my ex from my mind? This
is a question that I was asked recently, and I'll
tell you this.

Speaker 4 (30:28):
You don't.

Speaker 6 (30:29):
Your ex is part of your memories. So instead of
obsessing on how to remove your ex from your mind,
start to focus on how you expand your own energy,
with your own acceptance, with your own forgiveness, so you
become such a powerful person within.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Those Yes, so you get the idea.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
I actually find that very powerful. I was getting into
that I hypnotized.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
I didn't mean to interrupt you. She has recently spoken
about how she's used hypnotherapy because she's got a very
famous fear of flying. She's terrified flying. I've also had
hypnosis to get over my fear of you. Yeah, it did.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Have you ever seen hypnotis?

Speaker 1 (31:08):
No, But I'm really open to think too. So anyway
back to him, he's kind of like got that Bradley
Cooper look. He's very handsome. And they've been seen together
on trips to Majorca and big Sir, like near Malibu,
but in Mayoka, they're there with Jason Bateman. They're holiday
Jason Bateman in Spain.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
And I feel like Jason Bateman is Jennifer Anison's most
important person. Like that's how you know when something serious
is when she introduces someone to Jason Bateman. They're best friends.
They talk about how they have dinner every Sunday night.
He's constantly talking about her on SmartLess, his podcast. Like
that means it's serious.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Okay, Well, she has not had a public relationship that
we know about since she's split from Justin through in
twenty eighteen. None of them have confirmed it's white scarlet
scossip after the break? Are we seeing the end of university?
This is going to lead to some heated debate here.
We're going to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
Next one Unlimited out loud Access. We drop episodes every
Tuesday and Thursday exclusively from Mama May. Subscribers follow the
link in the show notes to get us in your
ears five days a week, and a huge thank you
to all our current subscribers.

Speaker 4 (32:23):
Don't go to university in twenty twenty six, Just don't.
That advice comes from an unlikely source. Jenna Price, an
education writer and columnist in the Citney Morning Herald who
herself has a doctorate. Price writes, I spent my entire
young parenthood urging my children to study hard and to
go to university. Now, she says, parents need to stop pushing.

(32:45):
Do not force the next generation onto a treadmill with
no safety barriers, no assurance, and no confidence in the future.
I had to say this article made me really sad.
It used to be that education was a silver bullet.
That's certainly the message that I was getting when I
grew up. It was a way that we ensured a
level playing field for everyone and an opportunity if you

(33:07):
worked hard, you could move yourself up the social ladder.
But now successive governments are defunding the sector. AI is
leading us to question the whole purpose of what an
education is, let alone a higher education. And I can
kind of see Jenna Price's point. It does seem like
a gamble, when before it seemed like the suurest thing

(33:27):
the ultimate goal.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
Jesse.

Speaker 4 (33:29):
I know this made you feel sad too, because that's
how you commented on it in the Slack, But isn't
it realistic?

Speaker 3 (33:36):
At this point?

Speaker 2 (33:37):
It made me really sad. And there's a I suppose
a point that Jenna Price made in this that I
feel is being missed, and it's the words next year.
So she says, don't go to university next year. And
the reason that she says that is because there are
some really specific policy issues at play. I have a
lot of friends who moved into academia and they will

(33:59):
talk about the job losses. The gutting of entire departments
of history, of sociology, of politics has just been so devastating,
especially at a time I would argue we need.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
It, and well has that been?

Speaker 2 (34:15):
So there's a few reasons. One big one is that
in twenty twenty under the Morrison government they had like
a job ready graduates package, and it meant that humanities
became far more expensive to study one hundred and seventeen
percent increase.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
Because it was less vocational.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Though it was it was less vocational, but basically.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Dading that an arts degree costs fifty thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, it's become way, way, way more expensive. And so
what that means is that they went look engineering, stem,
all of that. That's what we want now.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
All those degrees are cheaper.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Well basically they're just more incentives to do them right right,
And what that means is that there's defunding of certain subjects,
whether that be because I suppose on paper it's like, oh, historian,
what do you need a philosopher? A philosopher, what do
you need one of them for? Well, the reason that
you need one for is because of something called like
peer reviewed research, which is like an understanding of all

(35:09):
human knowledge that has come before us, like when I
went to university. Mayor, I'll explain this to you because
you wouldn't know try and use small words I an cumuli.
Are you get like readers?

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Do you know what a reader is?

Speaker 1 (35:22):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (35:22):
So it's like when you read, you like there are
like words on a page and it like you can
almost hear them in your head. Anyway, I'm trying to
explain reading to MEA a reader is when you get
like a whole lot of the most influential work in
a particular like whether it's philosophy or history like let's

(35:42):
say World War two, right, and it's got the most
important chapters ever written on it. You with someone who
are not in university, you actually don't have access to that,
Like I now, not being a university, I don't have
access to any of that knowledge. Right, there's a question
mark does it's yeah? But basically the point is that
you have access to a certain level of knowledge and

(36:04):
rigor and skills that have never been more important, like
critical thinking, like judgment, all of that. And there was
this great article in The Conversation which had as the headline,
AI is driving down the price of knowledge and the
knowledge premium is deflating. So basically knowledge has become this commodity.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
But isn't that good because it means that knowledge is
more accessible. Because you said before tertiary education was the
great equalizer, it wasn't because a lot of people couldn't
afford to go to university. So back in nineteen eighty nine,
twenty percent of high school students went on to university,
and it sort of increased by about ten percent each
decade until the last couple of years where it started

(36:45):
to go backwards for the first time. It's now at
forty one percent, which is the lowest it's been since
twenty fourteen, And partly they say that's because there's more employment,
so there are more job opportunities for people, and they
don't have to necessarily be tertially educated. But if you are,
you're likely to earn between twenty five to ninety percent

(37:07):
more as someone with tertiar education in your career, so
there's still a lot of reasons. And then of course
there are some jobs you can't do like doctor, doctor, lawyer,
architect without some kind of qualification.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
So there's a few things that have happened. The first
is COVID I think was a massive disruptor to this
entire industry because the international students and all of that,
and that was like a big source of income for
universities like that had.

Speaker 1 (37:32):
And it just got cut off, yeah, overnight.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
But interestingly, as you say, in the UK and the US,
they've done a big study of kind of jobs to
get you into the workforce and requirements for degrees. As
AI skyrockets, requirements for your first job, you no longer
need a degree because it's like that knowledge they assume
is already there. But what I would argue is that
the knowledge isn't already there. We think it is, but
it's not to the same standard like what you learn

(37:56):
in a university degree, what you learn about synthesizing knowledge
is not available on chat GPT. It simply isn't.

Speaker 4 (38:03):
I've got a lot of thoughts about this, and I
want to pick up on the idea of that. Even
you know, thirty years ago, insity was for people who
could afford it. I think what we've seen in the
last thirty forty years is this idea of education as
something that adds value to an employee and to an employer.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
And to life. Well, that's what I'm democracy.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
When I was at university, the big thing that we
were meant to be learning was how to code. Well,
now we don't need to code because the machines know
how to code. So I'm very wary of anyone telling you, like,
this is the skill you need to learn to be marketable. Today,
it turns out that maybe the skills you need to
learn to be marketable are much less tangible or concrete

(38:46):
than that. And there are things like learning how to
read something and ask questions and think critically about it afterwards,
and that stuff is also fun as well. And I
think we've gotten this narrative coming out of Silicon Valley
that university is for elites and it's silly. Like Peter Teele,
for instance, the venture capitalist has been giving out scholarships
to young people to not go to university, to go

(39:08):
and work for him in Silicon Valley, and he's pushing
this idea that university is again for out of touch elites.
And I just want to push back on that and
say that it would be so much nicer if university
was seen as a place where you could learn knowledge
for knowledge's sake. It's not about turning yourself into a.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
More productive worker.

Speaker 4 (39:26):
It's about reading some really great books and like talking
about what great thinkers have thought through history.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
Yeah it's not for everyone, though, because for me, I
didn't really know what I wanted to do, but just
UNI didn't suit me. Like all the things that you
talked about loving about university and big ideas and sitting
around and thinking, I found it sort of too slow
and too big. Not that I was better than it,
but I wanted to sort of get stuck in and

(39:54):
get my hands dirty rather than thinking, yeah, it just
didn't suit me.

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Which I think is a fair point. And I think
that with limited resources, the experience of being at university
has changed and is probably far worse than it was
when I was at university, even fifteen years ago.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
I have a cultural time at university because I grew up,
of course, watching all you know, all the American movies
and college life, and you did have that. You went
to Harvard, you had college life, Amelia. But I want
to ask you how much that colored your experience of
university and then Jesse, if you did that in Australia.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (40:26):
Part of what I loved about the fact that everyone
at my university lived on campus was that you just
had meals every day with different people. You'd meet someone
in a class and then go and have lunch together afterwards.
Every single day, three meals a day. You're eating with
different people, You're talking about different things. There was a
sense that you were learning how to talk about ideas

(40:46):
and disagree with people in a respectful way.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Ah, that's interesting.

Speaker 4 (40:52):
My very first day there, we did something where I
was divided into a little learning group and we went
around to introduce ourselves and there was a guy in
the group who said, my name is Mark, and I'm
a Republican from New York And that was how he
introduced himself. And he was really proud of the fact
that he was conservative on a campus where, to be fair,
there were not a lot of conservatives. And by the

(41:14):
end of our four years there, he was planning the
same sex marriage of his best friend to his partner,
something he never thought that he would have done when
back back in a much more conservative era when same
sex marriage was still very much being hotly debated.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
So he had an ideological evolution.

Speaker 4 (41:33):
By meeting new people and by being exposed to new ideas.
And I think about that a lot, because I think
that's really the main value of what I got out
of that experience.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
I didn't live on campus. I think that really changes
your experience of it. But they're some of the experiences
that shaped me the most. Like I learned from actual historians,
and I majored in Holocaust studies and was taught by
a man who lost both his parents in the Holocaust
and fled Europe, and he was worked at the Sydney
Jewish Museum. Like stuff like that, you and learning, Hey,

(42:06):
I can't give you that experience, no, no learning, research
principles that have come in handy and in what I
do every day. And that's why this conversation feels so
existential to me, because yes, it's about university policy and
what universities look like in Australia next year. But actually
I think it does belong to a broader story about

(42:26):
this anti intellectualism I feel that almost was pushing through
during COVID maybe, and.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
It's part of why I would argue in the US,
the Trump administration is doing all it can to basically
bring universities to their nees because they know that these
are potentially dangerous and subversive places. When we talk about
love of learning, that's so abstract. But I'm glad that
you mentioned a specific thing that you learned and studied, Jesse,
and how it stuck with you, because my most amazing

(42:55):
experience was I hated maths in high school. I stopped
doing it at the end of year ten. I was
so bad at it. I would like sit in exams
and add up my score and be like, oh, I'm
going to barely scrape past fifty in this, and I
just couldn't wait to get get rid of it. But
because I did a liberal arts degree, which I know
have increased in popularity in Australia in recent years too.

(43:16):
Where you have to do a bit of maths, you
have to do a bit of science in addition to
your humanities major. I had to do a maths class.
It was called the Magic of Numbers and it was
my favorite class spoiler alert. I came to see that
maths was like magical and beautiful and that prime numbers
are like the greatest mystery of all time.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
And I just you see.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
How my eyes light up about it, and I just
hated maths before. So I want other people to have
that experience, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
And it's funny this kind of Silicon Valley pushback on
sort of the intellectual elite, and they joke about, oh,
you're going to study African lesbian poetry, like you hear
kind of conservatives say that the story of Steve Jobs
being at university, there are all these stories about the
ones that dropped out and they didn't really need it.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
Mark Zuckerberg, he's a famous one.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yes, and they all dropped out right. But the story
of like how Apple got its font is that he
stumbled in two way lecture on like hieroglyphics or something
and learned something about about font and that to me
has been like my study of Greek and Roman myth,
which sounds so ridiculous, has informed both the books I've written,

(44:23):
and like the serendipity of being just surrounded by knowledge.
Knowledge builds on knowledge, and when you pull the kind
of plug out of intellectualism in a democracy, I think
you get to a really, really scary place.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Just before we go, I have a question. I was
sitting with my girlfriend Paula at dinner the other night,
and I don't remember how it came up, but we
realized that we know each other's mobile phone numbers, and
we know our husband's mobile phone numbers and our parents,
but that's it. We don't know our children's. We don't
know any other people's mobile phone numbers. Whose mobile phone

(44:58):
numbers do you know?

Speaker 3 (44:59):
Off by heart?

Speaker 2 (45:00):
My sisters and I can also tell you my home
phone number from twenty five years ago.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
So can I.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
I can tell tell you my home phone number for
fifty years ago.

Speaker 4 (45:08):
I know my childhood lam line, my childhood best friend's
land line, and that's it. Have you seen there's a
great episode of Colin from Accounts, which is a show
that I absolutely love with that Rare Thing, which has
a better second season than it's first. In the second season,
there's an episode where a woman falls asleep on a
train and the train terminates at the end of its line,
and it's late at night and her phone is dead

(45:30):
or isn't working or something, and she literally has no she.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Doesn't have to call it.

Speaker 4 (45:36):
She has no way to get home because she goes
to a phone or banishing amounts of them anyway, and
there's no one she can call. O, okay, right, oh
four one six three, come on over one sixth three,

(45:58):
Oh four.

Speaker 6 (45:58):
One six three.

Speaker 3 (46:00):
That fuck it.

Speaker 6 (46:03):
My mother's number is oh four.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
One six three, Yes, And I think about that all
the time.

Speaker 4 (46:11):
I'm like, I really should teach my children my phone number,
but they don't have the constant children's phone numbers.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
I would below and be like, do you have my mom?

Speaker 3 (46:21):
I don't think they want.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
You to do that, I know, so I think it's
actually a really fun if you're looking for a fun
bit of small talk, say to someone, what phone numbers
do you know? Off by heart? And for most of
us it's before the contacts function was available. Anyone that's
got a phone since then you don't know their number
like you know your own, and then you know Claire's

(46:42):
because when was the last time you dialed a mobile
phone number or any phone number by hand?

Speaker 4 (46:46):
So true.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
A big thank you to all of you the out
louders for listening to today's show and our fabulous team
for putting the show together. We will be back in
your ears tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
Something that I'm going to listen to is the subs
episode that you guys did about all the crazy things
that are going on in America at the moment. You
spoke about Alcatraz and what that is a bit more
about the Big Beautiful Bill and and what else did.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
You the horror of the Texas Fly, like the camp.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
There's been so much going on in the US, So
of course we made the most of having a US correspondent, Amelia.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Lister someone in the group that what makes Amelia a
US correspondent? I was like the fact that she's a
journalist with like one hundred years experience and used to
work for the New York I'm also that.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
Literally an American for what it's worth.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
There we go, and she sounds a bit American too.
That's all the qualifications I need.

Speaker 4 (47:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Yeah, that's the icing on the cake.

Speaker 3 (47:35):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
We'll put a link in our show notes to that
episode if you want to listen right now.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
Bye bye.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Shout out to any Muma mia subscribers listening. If you
love the show and want to support us as well,
subscribing to MoMA Miya is the very best way to
do so. There is a link in the episode description.
The information discussed in this podcast is general in nature
and is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It

(48:02):
does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and should
not be relied upon as such. Always seek the guidance
of your doctor or qualified health professional with any questions
you may have regarding your health or a medical condition.
Never disregard professional advice or delay seeking it because of
something you've heard in this podcast.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Sex Chat No Woman Wants To Have

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

All Episodes

The Sex Chat No Woman Wants To Have

Stuff You Should Know