The Hysteria Over Mass Hysteria

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Before we begin, just a heads up that this episode contains adult language.

The other week, the podcaster Dan Tabersky came into our studio and told us a strange story.

It took place in May of 2004 in Vancouver on a city bus.

A man is getting off the bus and he says to the bus driver, how's your day?

And the bus driver says, good.

And the guy getting off the bus says, not for long.

And he gets off the bus.

And the bus driver is like, huh?

Like, super threatening and weird.

And what does that mean?

A few minutes later, the bus driver starts to feel nauseous.

And he asks if any of the other passengers are feeling sick.

And one of the passengers says, I'm feeling sick.

And so now they're thinking, okay, shit, this guy did something.

The bus driver pulls over and they call the paramedics.

Paramedics get sick.

Many of the people on the bus go to the hospital.

They do tests.

They test everything on the bus in and out, and they find nothing.

No toxins, nothing that would have made them sick.

No gas, no chemicals.

In all, 19 people were put into quarantine.

And they all get better in a couple hours, and that's it.

Weird, right?

But it gets weirder because even though investigators could not find a physical explanation for what happened, they did hone in on a cause.

It's a mass psychogenic illness.

The understanding is that it was a mass psychogenic illness.

What's a mass psychogenic illness?

Psychogenic means it's coming from your head.

It's originating in the mind and the psyche, as opposed to the physical body or an organic cause.

And then what happens is that it spreads.

The way you catch it isn't like, you know, coughing on somebody or not washing your hands.

It's you see somebody having the symptoms and you unconsciously pick up those symptoms and they become real for you too.

So you're not faking it.

You're not acting out what the other person is doing.

You're actually having the symptoms that the person you know is having.

Those symptoms can be all kinds of things.

It could be paralysis.

It could be passing out.

It could be unusual laughter.

It could be numbness.

It could be GI issues.

It could be non-stop coughing.

It could be hiccups.

It could be extremely violent ticks, but there's no physical cause.

They can't find any reason that it's happening.

And then it spreads and then it spreads and it could spread to three people.

It could spread to 10.

It could spread to hundreds.

It could spread to thousands.

It's really weird.

Yeah.

It's almost like you're talking about like magic or like mysticism or something, but it's 100% real.

And strange as it may sound, it's very likely you've heard of this phenomenon before, just going by its older, more fraught name.

Hysteria is not dead.

Hysteria is not dead.

It's the kind of thing you think is dead.

It doesn't seem possible.

It doesn't seem like it should be happening, but it's happening more than you think.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Mass psychogenic illnesses, mass hysteria, that can be hard to wrap your head around.

A group of people begins experiencing physical symptoms because of something that started in one of their minds.

But not only is this phenomenon real, not talking about it, not acknowledging it, not taking it seriously, it's limiting the way we see and understand the modern world.

In today's episode, Dan Tabersky, the host of Hysterical, a new podcast about, well, mass hysteria, is going to walk us through the history and present of this phenomenon: what it is, where it comes from, why it's so stigmatized, and why it shouldn't be.

So, today, on Decodering, how does mass hysteria help explain the seemingly inexplicable?

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Like I said, Dan Tabersky makes podcasts.

Maybe you've heard some of them.

If you haven't, you're in for a treat.

But before he started making podcasts, he was a TV producer.

And as a TV producer, he had a memorable experience with his own mind-body connection.

I used to make a lot of like TV pilots.

And I remember the first pilot I made was incredibly stressful.

And I was the executive producer.

I was young and did did not know what I was doing.

And you're on a set, there's like monitors, and people are looking at you for answers.

And like, it's really stressful.

And the day before we shot the pilot, I woke up with a sty in my eye.

Like, my eye was like inflated.

Like, the minute that I needed people to look at me and think that I was in charge, I was like, I walked in like Kwatsumoto.

But what was so interesting about it is that it happened with the next pilot I did, too.

That the day before, I woke up and my eye had the same eye had blown up.

And so they would call me Sty Eye.

Like the name I got was Sty Eye.

This very legible stress response, this on-the-nose reaction taking place in Dan's eye.

It was a peek into how much power our minds can have over our bodies.

And maybe this experience was lurking in Dan's mind when years later, he started learning about what seemed to be a Russian psyop against Americans in Cuba.

Havana syndrome, that sort of mysterious illness that is afflicting CIA officers and diplomats.

It's a mystery that's plagued the U.S.

intelligence community and the State Department for years.

You might remember when Havana syndrome started making headlines back in 2017.

The mysterious and debilitating symptoms reported by dozens of government workers.

Serious brain injuries, causing impaired vision and memory loss.

There are now at least 130 suspected cases across at least six countries.

The common experience described is hearing a loud, harsh noise followed by nausea, vertigo, passing out, hearing loss, just a battery of symptoms that would not go away.

They would get worse and worse.

And I just, immediately, the conversation around Havana syndrome went to, it's an attack.

The main culprit is likely some kind of microwave weapon.

Of course, it was a weapon.

An energy weapon.

Absolutely.

The Russians are doing something.

They're making us sick.

We don't know what the weapon is, but we know they must be doing it.

Like it became, it became about an attack really quickly.

But as these possible attacks were investigated, it became less clear they were attacks.

Experts could not and have not been able to find any consistent or conclusive physical cause, which left open another possibility, a mass psychogenic illness.

Now, a mass psychogenic illness is a diagnosis of exclusion.

You have to rule out all the other possibilities first.

But as investigators were able to do that, rule out possible cause after possible cause, Mass psychogenic illness was one of the explanations left standing.

But there was something about it in the conversations that were happening around Havenosing where people couldn't quite countenance that.

They couldn't quite wrap their brain around the idea that it could be a mass hysteria, to use the old word.

Like it's uncomfortable.

And I just thought that was really interesting that it became really hard to acknowledge this very real possibility and the sort of backbends that people were doing in order to not call it a mass psychogenic illness.

Calling it a mass psychogenic illness seemed to feel diminishing, dismissive, accusatory, like saying it was all just in the victim's heads.

It feels like you're questioning their sanity.

It feels like you're questioning their sense of control of their body and mind.

Like it's a really,

you're telling, you're looking somebody in the eye and you're suggesting that they're not sick in the way they say they are.

Or if you tried hard enough, you could stop.

You're doing like, you need to buckle down and fix this.

Yeah, exactly.

Like now you're not, I'm telling you, it's all in your head.

Now you can stop, right?

Because it's easy.

You know, it's not real, right?

Yeah.

And that, and people have a hard time being called a liar.

And that's what it feels like to a lot of people when they hear mass psychogenic illness.

It feels like you're calling them a liar.

Dan found this reaction in Leroy, New York as well, a small town about an hour from Buffalo.

The bulk of his new podcast, Hysterical, focuses on a strange case that started to unfold there in 2011.

One day, a high school junior, she's a cheerleader on the cheerleading squad, and she wakes up from a nap with a stutter.

And the stutter over a few, the course of a few days gets worse, and it becomes twitches and ticks, verbal outbursts, you know, things like arms flailing, you know, heads turning randomly and uncontrollably.

Scary stuff.

About three weeks later, it spread to her best friend on the tree leading squad.

And I remember thinking, like, were they making it up?

Like, what is going on?

Like, everybody kind of just doubted it until it just kept happening.

This is Jessica, a former student at the high school who Dan interviewed.

She was skeptical that her peers weren't just faking it for attention until her best friend approached her at her locker.

She came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad.

I'm like, what are you doing?

Like, stop fucking around.

Like, why are you talking like that?

She's like,

I can't.

And she could not talk, like, was stuttering so bad that she could not even get out of word.

I'm like, holy shit, this is real.

Like, what happened?

And then it just sort of took off from there.

And the way that it was spreading from one to two to four and was almost multiplying so rapidly, it just became really freaking scary.

And the town, of course, basically erupted trying to figure out what was going on with their kids.

They tested the water and the air and the school.

They tested for heavy metals.

They looked for viruses and bacteria.

They just did all the things.

And the water came up fine.

The air came up fine.

Everything was coming up fine.

And they just weren't getting anywhere besides mass psychogenic illness.

Is there sort of like a checklist of psychogenic illness or the things that typically happen?

Yeah, I mean, in general, you would look at their unexplained symptoms.

They don't have any logical, organic, or physical cause.

They're spreading not randomly, but in very specific social groups, like a high school or a convent or a small town.

It happens more to girls than it does to boys.

It happens more to women than it does to men.

Sudden onset is very common.

So it's not like this thing that sort of gradually happens over the course of months, like it happens immediately.

And no other logical explanation.

even if a psychogenic illness is the only explanation that remains even if it's convincing to investigators and journalists and bystanders for the people experiencing it the ones being told their frightening symptoms are a physical manifestation of some stress or trauma buried deep in their unconscious it's a tough sell that wasn't it for me i just doesn't know like that's just that's not it this is alicia one of the women dan talked to who got sick in in Leroy.

She rejected her diagnosis, rejected the implication that she'd had some kind of unspoken trauma that caused it.

It just didn't sit with me.

It did not make sense.

I'm like, then how does this explain everything else that's happening to me?

The whole diagnosis just felt disrespectful and familiar.

There's just a history in the U.S.

of women being dismissed by doctors.

You know, it's all in your head.

It's not physical.

Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating.

It sounded to Alicia like being called hysterical.

Hysteria is an old, old word with a lot of heavy baggage.

And when we come back, we're going to look at how it picked up all that baggage and brought it into the modern world.

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So hysteria is not a medical diagnosis anymore.

It's not something a doctor will tell you that you have, or it shouldn't be anyway.

And yet, it is connected to psychogenic illnesses.

I want to talk about hysteria and sort of the roots of this.

So, can we go all the way back?

Okay, so how old is hysteria?

I mean, in one of the first medical documents ever found, they mention hysterical illness.

They don't necessarily mention the word, but they mention unexplainable symptoms.

Well, how old is that document?

Before Jesus.

Yeah, it's been around forever, and they relate it to the womb.

The idea of blaming unexplained symptoms specifically for women, blaming them on vague, general womb stuff.

They would call it the wandering womb, and that the womb was literally wandering around the body, causing all these troubles.

You know, I just always imagine these doctors, like they step out of the room to talk about what's going on with the woman inside, and they're like, it's probably her womb wandering around.

Hysteria even comes from the word for uterus right like hystera means uterus in greek yes it's the word for uterus which is ridiculous such a it's part it's a great reason to not use the word hysteria but it's too late now

we've crossed the rubicon

From the beginning, hysteria was associated with sexuality.

The underlying problem for hysterical women was thought to be that they had an abnormal sex life.

If they had more sex, maybe those wombs wouldn't act up.

And that association between hysteria and women's sexuality would never really go away, even as manifestations of hysteria could look very, very different.

It's a psychological, physical, social, cultural phenomenon that's been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years.

In the summer of 1518, for example, a woman in the city of Strasbourg stepped into a square and began to dance uncontrollably.

And then she kept on dancing and dancing and dancing.

For hours and hours, and then days.

And then other people joined in until it was hundreds and couldn't stop to the point where some of them died, literally danced themselves to death.

I mean, there's cases of meowing nuns in convents, nuns who couldn't stop meowing.

I mean, many people think what happened to the Witches of Salem was a mass psychogenic illness.

Surprise it wasn't the devil, that it may have just been a mass psychogenic illness that was spreading among these girls in this very small town.

The devil, demons, and other supernatural causes had by then become a common explanation alongside sex and the wandering womb for a woman's inexplicable symptoms.

And it was that way for a long time until we get to France in the 19th century.

In the 1800s, there was sort of a boom in hysteria, which is sort of insane.

Tell me.

Meaning that in the 1890s, Paris, all these women began to come down with symptoms that people couldn't explain.

Paralysis, loss of consciousness, ticks, hysterical laughter, small things like GI issues or coughing fits, large things like incredible bodily contortions that the women couldn't control.

And they all began to gather them in a hospital called Salpetrière in Paris.

The head of neurology at Salpetrière was a doctor named Jean-Martin Charcot, and he had a new approach to these symptoms.

Charcot really begins to redefine the way we look at it by treating it as a medical issue, not like a womb thing or like a devil thing.

Charcot thought it was physical.

He's like, we just don't know what it is yet.

And we're going to run tests and we're going to figure out what is physically causing these symptoms.

Charcot hypothesized that hysteria was caused by a lesion on the brain and he was eager to share this hypothesis with colleagues.

What was interesting about Charcot is that he then sort of turned it into a show where every Friday

he would put the hysterical women on display on a stage.

He actually had a 500-seat amphitheater built.

Ostensibly it was for doctors, right?

Like the doctors would come and witness these symptoms and try to figure out what it meant.

But ultimately, artists and writers started coming.

The surrealists fell in love with hysteria as like the greatest poetic invention of the century.

Like these women became famous.

And one of the people who stopped by Charcot's amphitheater was a young doctor from Vienna named Sigmund Freud.

He comes in to check out the medical mystery.

This is crazy.

And Freud shows up and he's like, I actually don't think it's physical.

This is really broad.

And Freud shows up and he basically, instead of looking at the body, he looks at the mind.

Freud began talking with so-called hysterical women and listening to what they had to say.

And he basically realizes that the symptoms they're experiencing are connected to the thoughts in their head and the experiences they're having as women in culture, in that society.

I mean, it was basically the discovery of the unconscious, that things are happening in your mind that you don't have access to, and they could be creating physical problems in your body.

And that was earth-shattering.

Freud's new understanding of hysteria didn't get rid of the old misogynistic associations with sexuality.

As brilliant as he was, he brought his own fixations and hang-ups, sexual and otherwise, to his analysis and theories.

But his insights were transformative.

Freud was the one who basically figured out, for better, for worse, that what happens in your mind and what happens in your body and what happens in the world are all really connected in ways that we don't always understand.

Freud coined a new term for hysteria.

He called it conversion disorder, as in the conversion of what's happening in your mind into what's happening in your body.

But then something sort of weird happened to the conversion disorder, to the hysteria that Freud and his colleagues in the culture had become so fixated on.

It was so prominent.

It was so confounding.

It's this thing that's happening everywhere.

And then, you know, 50 years later, hysteria is completely gone.

It's literally not happening.

This specific manifestation of hysteria, the one with with contortions and spasms and hysterical paralysis, the one happening to European women, just seems to fade away.

There are a lot of explanations for why.

One of the reasons why hysteria went away, the hysteria that we knew from the turn of the century, is because there was more psychological literacy.

Like after Freud and after sort of the discovery of the unconscious and sort of psychiatry, our understanding sort of grew about psychodynamics and the mind and the body.

A lot of people think it disappeared basically because we de-victorianized, that the sort of specific sexual and gender repression that was happening for women at the turn of the century in Europe began to abate.

It began to get better.

And when that went away, a lot of people equated that with hysteria going away, and that's not what happened.

What happened instead is that this particular presentation of hysteria dissipated, but it had become so well known, so well studied, so synonymous with hysteria itself, that when it faded away, people thought maybe hysteria was gone too.

It didn't matter if other cohorts of people seemed to be experiencing psychogenic phenomena.

The history of hysteria is that when things are happening to men, they get defined as not hysteria, even though they're quite similar.

So shell shock during World War I, for example, it was a mass psychogenic illness where men were coming back from the front with ticks, paralysis, numbness, mutism, hysterical blindness.

There was one case of a man coming back with paralysis in the trigger finger.

Real, real symptoms, real things happening.

And at first, they were saying that it was from being so close to exploding bombs.

It was like the shock of the shell, like the impact.

But then they realized that a lot of these people weren't in combat.

And they realized it was just people being in,

which is obviously the most stressful situation he'd be in.

But it wasn't defined as hysteria because men don't get hysteria.

As the 20th century rolled on, the term hysteria became unmoored, turning into a catch-all term for just about anything confusing going on with a woman.

It stopped meaning anything because they started calling everything hysteria.

Basically, they over-defined hysteria to mean anything and everything that we don't understand, so that it started to mean nothing.

It also then became an insult, right?

It became something where...

Don't be hysterical.

Yeah.

Like, I can't work with you if you're being hysterical.

And it became a grossly misogynistic label.

Because hysteria became such a shitty word, they just started calling it different things.

They changed the name to conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness.

In 1980, hysteria was officially deleted from the DSM, the authoritative manual of mental disorders.

It was treated more and more like a bygone Victorian relic, like fainting couches and smelling salts.

As the 20th century rolls on and hysteria gets whittled away, you know, the big book in the 80s that was written about hysteria and the sort of history of hysteria, the last line in the book is hysteria is dead, that is certain.

It has taken its secrets with it to the grave.

So even the people that are writing the histories of it were saying that it was gone, but that's just not what happened.

Because hysteria, or as it's known now, conversion disorder, doesn't only look like one of Freud's case studies.

It can look like a woman dancing herself to death, a man in shock after war, a CIA agent experiencing the symptoms of brain trauma, and a high school girl violently ticking.

Which is part of what's so complicated about hysteria is that you look at it and and you're like, that's not hysteria.

That was hysteria.

Because the symptoms are constantly evolving.

But however those symptoms evolve, they start with one person.

And that's where they stay most of the time.

It's very rare, but sometimes it spreads.

It's contagious.

Yeah, it's contagious.

I just think that's fascinating and incredible that somebody could be having symptoms and you wouldn't just see it and mimic it, but that your mind would tell your body, you're having some symptoms too.

You're having those symptoms too.

It's real.

But how does that happen?

When we come back, we explore how hysteria jumps from an individual to a group.

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So, how does conversion disorder move from one person to many and why?

Medically, there's not a lot of clarity here, but we do know some things.

And one is that in the rare cases when a psychogenic illness becomes a mass psychogenic illness, a set of symptoms is transmitted from one person to another

by our eyes.

Basically, it's a line of sight illness.

Because I see you experiencing these symptoms, I start having the symptoms, physically for real.

It sounds so unlikely, but we all experience variations of it.

For me, it's like incredibly extreme versions of just hysterical laughter.

You see somebody laughing, like you're smiling right now and it makes me smile.

Like I want to see it and now you're, and you just, and we're so used to that, we don't even think about it, but it's actually an uncontrollable reaction.

This is real.

I really can't stop smiling because I'm watching you smiling.

It's not fake.

You know, itching is contagious.

Like you see before like yawning.

Like it's like all we have all these like minor conduits of it that we understand, right?

Like, yeah, you get that, right?

You get like we're connected and it's just like, it's, it's like a leveling up of that and it seems like it's a huge leveling up and it's hard to like graph your head around for sure then it's not just like you're laughing i'm laughing or it's not like you're itching i'm itching it's like i have red bumps growing out of my like that you could physically react like red bumps could then appear on your body and like i just think that that is like next level yeah but also kind of beautiful beautiful like and that we're that connected that we're that connected yeah exactly exactly

beautiful is probably not the word that comes to mind for people experiencing frightening, debilitating symptoms they can't explain.

But these symptoms don't just demonstrate the extraordinary connection between individuals.

They can show us the extraordinary connection and sensitivity individuals have to the culture around them.

And this sensitivity to the world we inhabit, to its moods, to its pressures, to its politics, helps explain the why of mass psychogenic illness.

Dan told us about a case that throws that why into pretty stark relief.

This one started in October 2001.

I talked to an epidemiologist who was investigating a mystery illness in Oregon.

Well, I was doing my residency in public health and preventive medicine, and we started getting reports of all these oddball rashes.

A mystery rash that's leaving students itching and scratching.

Hundreds of kids broke out in this rash.

They would be on their face to their arms to their legs.

It would pass from student to student, but not the teachers.

And then when they would leave the school, the rash would disappear.

And then it wouldn't come back until they arrived back at school the next day.

They couldn't explain it.

And it wasn't just happening in Oregon.

Kids in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, and Washington have also complained about rashes.

So they start testing everything.

They're like testing school supplies.

They're testing, you know, the molds and the air and the water in the schools.

You really have to look at all the possibilities.

One of the main hypotheses was that it was something environmental.

What they were cleaning the classroom desks with and the floors and the windows and what their air quality systems were like, you know, their ventilation, you know, in case it was airborne.

And then, of course, we were thinking, well, kids have a zillion viruses.

All of these hypotheses get ruled out with testing, but the doctor, who has to remain anonymous, comes up with more.

And this doctor, she even, realizing that this is happening mostly to girls, the doctors even start looking for things that only schoolgirls would be exposed to, like makeup.

She started to get focused on these glitter stickers that the girls were sort of into at that time.

There might be like a toxin on the stuff that makes it stick to your skin, just like anything.

Well, you know, it's those kind of details, though, that break a case.

And the doctor was extremely conscious that she needed to explore all the details, all the possibilities.

Because there have been too many things in the past that have been labeled psychogenic that really weren't, you know, especially in women's health.

But all the possible explanations began to fall away until there was one basic possibility left.

You know, eventually we started to think more just about the psychogenic component.

And this psychogenic component, it makes even more sense when you keep in mind that this was happening in October of 2001, just weeks after September 11th, and actually as a new terrifying story swept the nation.

The first case of the rash broke out on the same day that a man in Florida received the first package of anthrax in the mail.

He is almost certainly the first American to be killed in a deliberate anthrax attack.

Just a week's time, we have had four confirmed cases of anthrax all over.

And so there was a real fear in the air, a fear of toxins, a fear that things that were going to be around you could make you sick.

And you could see how it would activate something in...

people's minds and you could see how it activates something collectively too.

Especially if you're a kid, right?

You're seeing this on the news and your parents worry about it.

And what the fuck is anthrax?

And you've got to be kidding me.

Think about how scary that time was, how stressful and anxious, how real that stress and anxiety felt.

And think about all those kids taking that real mental distress and converting it into something physical and sensible, honestly, or rash.

And then getting not just attention for it, but getting attended to.

It wants attention.

Hysteria happens in places that need attention.

Something's wrong.

The circumstances surrounding a mass psychogenic illness are not always quite so legibly wrong, but they often happen in fraught cultural moments, in communities under stress.

It happens during war.

It happens after the Black Plague.

It happens in the Industrial Revolution, like they would start having mass psychogenic illnesses in factories because the conditions were so terrible.

It happens in the fissures.

It happens to women in repressive Victorian Europe, to foreign service officers who have been at war for decades, to teenage girls who are stressed out as a matter of course and then suddenly find themselves dealing with inexplicable and terrifying ticks.

And I think that that is what makes mass psychogenic illness and the idea of hysteria so unusual to talk about, in that it's not just medical.

It's not even medical and psychological.

It's also social and it's also cultural.

It's what's happening, not just to the person experiencing the symptoms, but what's happening to all of us.

And that your body could be reflecting that.

That, I think, is one of the really unnerving parts about a mass psychogenic illness and hearing that diagnosis.

Like your body is a barometer.

Yeah.

Or something.

You're like, that seems wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

It just tries to put you in the context of the world in a way that you are losing control of yourself as a person because

you're susceptible.

You're susceptible to the world and what's happening in it.

Mass psychogenic illnesses, intense as they are, don't last forever.

They do dissipate, departing as mysteriously as they arrived.

There are things that can help the process along, like separating the people with symptoms from one another.

But the most helpful thing seems to just be a willingness to accept they might be happening in the first place.

A big part of a mass psychogenic illness going away is believing that it's a mass psychogenic illness.

Sort of acknowledging that this is a possibility.

It's sort of closing, it's like ending the story.

Do you think it would be useful for us to be more comfortable with acknowledging this is a not just a possibility but happens and like this isn't witchcraft this isn't like hocus pocus like this is a thing and it happens there's concrete reasons why it's real for these people and we would be better served to explain those things that way 100 the only problem is that you can't start doing that right away okay You still can't immediately look at somebody and say, oh, that's a mass, that's, that's a psychogenic illness, because it's, it is deflating and it is not

acknowledging all the other fucked up things that can happen.

And it could not be a mass psychogenic illness.

100%.

Like, we're all getting poisoned.

Like, it is possible, for sure.

You don't want to like jump the gun and say somebody must have a mass psychogenic illness because you could be missing something really big.

But mass psychogenic illnesses are also, in their way, something big.

The diagnosis might feel to the people suffering from it like a dismissal, like telling them whatever they're experiencing is all in their head.

But our heads, the super powerful organs that interpret the world and make us human,

they're nothing to scoff at.

Do you think like in 100 years, 200 years, we will look back on what we know about this and feel as informed as like Freud was?

I think the phenomenon of hysteria and mass psychogenic illness will evolve.

Like once it realizes it's getting figured out, it changes.

And that, I think, is what will happen.

Once we start to realize what it is, I think our internal stress, our internal trauma, our struggles, our societal stress will continue to exhibit itself in these ways.

We just don't know the ways it's going to happen.

Like it'll find the fissures.

It'll find the fissures, yeah.

Modern life is incredibly stressful, especially for people who are vulnerable.

And so, as long as that's the case, I think our bodies are going to find ways to express that.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

You should also please go listen to Hysterical Dan Tabersky's great seven episode series about so much more than what we discussed here.

You will love it.

You will learn so much.

And we're going to add a link to our show notes so you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Evan Chung.

Evan and I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman and with help from Sophie Codner.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

We'd like to thank Maria Alexa Kavanaugh and Alexandra Anderson.

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