How Shame Became the New Sex Ed with Carter Sherman

Speaker 1 Gen Z is having a sex recession. 20 and 30 somethings are having less sex than previous generations and are starting their sex lives later.

Speaker 2 Gen Z have been done dirty when it comes to dating. And people's views of dating is more polarizing than ever.

Speaker 3 For many teenagers, greater use of social media means a far greater sense of isolation.

Speaker 1 The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hardcore porn than all the American fighting forces in the Second World War.

Speaker 4 Sex said, here in the United States, it is nonsense and confusion because it teaches you how to be safe, but not the pleasures. And porn teaches you the pleasures, sort of, but not how to be safe.

Speaker 1 Carter Sherman, reproductive health and justice reporter at The Guardian, who interviewed over 100 young people for her new book. It's called The Second Coming.

Speaker 2 This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Whole Foods Markets. Eat well for less.

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Speaker 1 I'm truly so excited to have this conversation.

Speaker 2 You don't understand. Well, thank you for having me on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because like sometimes you're reading a book and then it's just like

Speaker 1 facts, facts, data, data, facts, facts, facts. And then here it's like facts, data, sex.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Good times.

Speaker 5 Why don't you lead with that?

Speaker 5 I mean, yeah, coffee, coffee, marriage, coffee, hospitals, hospitals, research.

Speaker 2 You know, I like to surprise. Okay, okay.
Yeah, that's the the secret thing that I also write about in addition to healthcare is sex, which is more fun. That's for sure.

Speaker 5 Sherman, your husband's no, it's my name.

Speaker 2 He asked if Sherman was my husband's name, and I was instantly like, no.

Speaker 2 Just no way.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's funny. His name is, his last name is Conway Pearson.
And so I would like to combine our names and be like

Speaker 2 Conway and Sherman and be Conman.

Speaker 2 And so I'm a journalist. I could be journalist Con Man.
He's a doctor. He could be Dr.
Conman. I think it would be, that's the only way I would change my name.

Speaker 1 Those are some of that's, I mean, like, those are some of those things in life that are terrible in the thought. Yes.
But man, what a beautiful idea. Yes.
That would be a great one. Thank you.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Conman. Especially if anything went wrong.

Speaker 1 You've like immunized yourself.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 What were you expecting?

Speaker 1 Well, when Dr. Conman, I'm sorry, you trusted Dr.
Conman.

Speaker 5 Totally your fault.

Speaker 1 It just becomes that in everything.

Speaker 1 Dr. Conman.

Speaker 2 His malpractice insurance might be really hard to come by, but right.

Speaker 5 I loved your reaction when I asked if that's his surname or yours, and you were like, mine.

Speaker 5 So you haven't changed your surname or you only use your surname when you're doing business?

Speaker 2 I haven't changed my surname. At all.
No.

Speaker 1 South Africa just made it. Do you see the law just changed? Yes.
Now

Speaker 1 I was shocked that you can't do it now. Now husbands can take the woman's name.

Speaker 2 It was like now? You know what you're talking about of it before? Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I was just like, wait, I didn't know that there was a law against this.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Would you?

Speaker 1 Would I what?

Speaker 1 Take my wife's name? Yes. Depends on if her name made my name cooler or more interesting.

Speaker 1 Like it's like, let's say her last name was like Weber. I wouldn't want to be like Trevor Weber.

Speaker 2 I don't know. I like that.
No, I'm not doing that.

Speaker 5 I actually do as well.

Speaker 2 Trevor Weber? Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 1 Now it's like I'm roasting myself everywhere I go. People are roasting me.

Speaker 2 Oh, Trevor Weber.

Speaker 1 No, I'm not. I don't want that.
Okay, maybe.

Speaker 2 So it would have to be like Lightning.

Speaker 2 Trevor Lightning?

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, okay.

Speaker 2 I like that this was your

Speaker 2 contribution.

Speaker 1 Trevor Lightning.

Speaker 5 Are you surprised by the person who said coinman?

Speaker 2 That's like a cool last name.

Speaker 1 No, but what I mean is like, you've got to take me, like Eugene Causa. It has a music to it.
Because you're used to it. No, no, no, no.
It does. There's certain names that don't have a music.

Speaker 1 And to those people, I apologize because your parents messed you up. Carter Sherman, that has music to it.
Carter Sherman.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 5 Beth feeling authorized.

Speaker 2 If you've written all over it. Exactly.
Somebody did tell me it would be a good name for like an airport paperback thriller writer. It would indeed.
The latest Carter. It would indeed.

Speaker 1 The latest Carter Sherman. It has that vibe.
Even like a rapper would say, Carter Sherman, never heard him. You know what I mean? It's got like a cool, like, basically not German.

Speaker 2 There we go. What? You see?

Speaker 1 You see what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 This is.

Speaker 2 I'm going to leave you with the theme song. That's what's going to happen here.

Speaker 1 This is, you see what I mean? These are good names. Eugene Cause has the flow.
Trevor Noah. Trevor Weber.

Speaker 1 No, Trevor Weber. It just sounds like you stumbled after saying it.
I wouldn't do that. But that's for your next book.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 The best names, just the list of who should take whose last name is your next book.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I would add, I think it is cool when men take their wives' last name.
Why? I also think that. Because it's unusual.

Speaker 5 Do you want to be the unusual guy at the bar?

Speaker 2 I mean, not no. It depends.

Speaker 2 Is it like,

Speaker 2 oh, I think this guy's.

Speaker 5 Mrs. Conman.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Think about this.

Speaker 2 Carefully. I think that would be so fun

Speaker 1 to sign everything as like carter condom yeah it could you know what it could be your natural evolution because like i look i look at all this the stuff not all the stuff that you've written um but i was going back into some of your older writings and one of the first pieces i could find was the one that you did for ms magazine right that's that's i think you were still an intern yes and it was a piece about um why

Speaker 1 aren't condoms designed for female pleasure?

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? I have no memory of writing this. Oh, what's the answer?

Speaker 1 No. No,

Speaker 1 you were asking the question.

Speaker 2 You were saying, like, why aren't they?

Speaker 1 Why are they not considering it? Why is it like, how does it fit on the penis? Does it work well on the man's penis? Does he like it? Does it work well for him? Does it feel this? Does it feel that?

Speaker 1 But you were like, but none of this work and none of this research is around, but how does it feel for her? And as I was reading that and then reading through your book, I went, oh, wow, this is,

Speaker 1 it's cool to see somebody's trajectory and

Speaker 1 watch them. You know, like we always meet people as they are now, but it's cool to meet them as they sort of were at a different time.

Speaker 1 And it made me wonder, like, what was the first thing that got you obsessed with the topic of sex, how we view sex, why sex is important to a society, a culture?

Speaker 1 Like, what was that first lightning bolt in your world?

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, I think it was one of the stories I used to open up the book, which is that I was pathologically obsessed with my own virginity. Like, I was so upset to be a 17-year-old virgin.

Speaker 2 I thought I was the last. I was upset.
I thought I was the last 17-year-old virgin on the planet. Might have been.
I mean,

Speaker 2 it felt like it.

Speaker 2 Like I fully, my, one of the last girls in my friend group to lose her virginity texted me during class that she had lost it because she cut school. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Had sex with this guy on her laundry room floor. I mean, it was great.
It sounded like. And I

Speaker 2 kept it together for the rest of school. And then I got into the car when my mom picked me up from school and I just burst out sobbing because I was so upset over the fact that I had.

Speaker 5 You're the last one standing.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 Wait, did you tell your mom why you were crying? Oh, yeah, of course. Wait, of course? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, there's no, of course, in my wait. So your mom's like, why are you crying? And you're like, well, because I can't get some.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And she was like, you know, it's fine. Like, everybody loses it at different times.
It's not a big deal.

Speaker 1 And I was like, these are the families I watched in movies and thought never existed.

Speaker 2 But also, we're talking about

Speaker 5 how people were born to be villains. I mean, they're villains.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're villain origin story. That's the opposite.

Speaker 5 Like Carter Sherman, the last highman

Speaker 2 that's my next book

Speaker 1 can you imagine eugene let's let's just play i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna give you i'm gonna take you through time okay we're gonna transport you to a black family a south african family to be exact to be exact okay okay i will play carter sherman this trevor noah as carter sherman all right

Speaker 1 And then I am, I am going to, and then you will be.

Speaker 1 You will be my mom and dad. You can be both at the same top.
Just parent and shirman. I want parent Sherman, but in South Africa.
Who was in the car with you that day?

Speaker 2 My mother. Just my mom.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so just the two of us. All right.
And

Speaker 1 action.

Speaker 2 And then.

Speaker 5 You know what? If you don't stop behaving like a white girl in this car, I'm going to drop you off now.

Speaker 2 So, so, sorry, mom. Sorry, mama.
Sorry. It was just such a hard day, mom.
It was such a hot day.

Speaker 5 What happened?

Speaker 2 My friend texted me mom and i found out that i'm the last virgin i'm the only person who's not getting sex mom

Speaker 2 at school

Speaker 2 oh man okay wait so your mom

Speaker 1 Okay, wait, so your mom, your mom goes, don't worry, it'll happen in time.

Speaker 2 Yes. And then I was like, well, did you, were you a virgin when you were my age? And she was like, oh, no.
No, no.

Speaker 2 Your mom. Your mom is black.
What's wrong?

Speaker 2 Oh, this is amazing. Oh, wow.
This is amazing.

Speaker 2 Really, yeah. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 She, of course, totally forgot the story. Cause you know how parents just fully forget the experiences that shape you forever.

Speaker 2 She forgot this. And then I was.
telling her the story again, you know, when I was writing the book. And she was like, I can't believe I said that.
I really should have lied.

Speaker 2 And I was like, okay, I get it. Like, you were not a virgin at 17.
Cool. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2 She really wanted to impress upon me.

Speaker 2 I feel like

Speaker 2 that story. Oh, man.
Sorry.

Speaker 1 It's the perfect jumping off point into

Speaker 1 what, you know, I don't know if there's right or wrong in it. I think rightly and wrongly.
our obsession with sex.

Speaker 1 Because on the one, there's one part of my brain that goes, why are we so obsessed with sex? There's another part of me that always goes like, like, why aren't we more obsessed with sex?

Speaker 1 In that it is, it is the thing that means most of us are here.

Speaker 1 It is the reason the human race will or will not continue in many ways.

Speaker 1 But what I love about your book is, and we'll, we'll go through like, you know, all the different topics that you get into in every, every single one of the chapters. I think you do it amazingly.

Speaker 1 It's like.

Speaker 1 It's not necessarily our obsession with sex that's wrong. It's what elements of sex we're obsessed with that become detrimental to a society.
And so like, let's talk about virginity.

Speaker 1 You know, when you you look at virginity throughout the decades, it's amazing how it changes. Because

Speaker 1 you're talking about crying because you're the last virgin. And then you just rewind time or go to a different place.
And the tears are because people aren't a virgin. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, for so long, virginity was something to be prized.
And in many places of the world, is still something to be prized, particularly for women.

Speaker 2 Like, it is essential to maintain your virginity in a lot of places at risk of, I mean, potentially even death, depending on where you are in the world.

Speaker 2 And so so it is kind of stunning how quickly that has flipped here in the United States, where it is seen as lame to be a virgin past a certain age.

Speaker 2 And I was really struck in writing the book that the feeling that I had that it was so uncool to be a virgin was shared by so many young people I talked to.

Speaker 2 Like all of them felt like having held onto their virginity for as long as they did, even if they lost their virginity early on, like that was the wrong age to do it.

Speaker 2 I talked to one young man who was like, as soon as at 14, he started feeling really bad that he

Speaker 2 at 14, yeah, that he had not seen.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, but it's interesting because younger people are actually having less sex than previous generations.

Speaker 2 So these young people are telling themselves, oh, I'm so lame for not having sex, but it doesn't match the reality that like most of their peers probably aren't having sex at this point.

Speaker 1 So do you find that are people just lying about having sex?

Speaker 2 Or are they?

Speaker 1 If everyone thinks they're lame for not having sex, but they are having less sex than ever before.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's lying so much as we don't really have open conversations about sex.

Speaker 2 I think the extent to which we talk about sex in public is oftentimes to stigmatize sex, or when you talk about sex amongst your friends, you're oftentimes like

Speaker 2 not lying, but maybe embellishing stories or talking about like only the good stuff.

Speaker 2 You're not really discussing the complexity of it or maybe your own feelings about how much sex you're having, how much sex you're not having, what your last sexual experience was like.

Speaker 2 And so I think that we're not really able to have conversations that get into the nuances of sex and the role that it plays in our lives. Because

Speaker 2 I think that we see sex oftentimes as something that should be private.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying it's not something that can't be deeply personal and something that you should hold for yourself, but I do think that we underestimate the ways that what's going on in public shape our approach to sex and shape or even our ability to have the kind of sex that we like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's some parts of the book where it feels like it feels like you're forcing us to ask the question,

Speaker 1 who is obsessed with whose sex and why? And what does it mean? You know, like

Speaker 1 when I was reading through it, I was thinking of you, you know, going through the decades and there's always these new moments in media where they'll be like, hookup culture. Is it out of control?

Speaker 1 Is there hookup culture? What does it mean for your kids? You know, and there's those news headlines. And then you like fast forward a few years and they'll be like, there's a virginity recession.

Speaker 1 There's a what, what? And there's like that. They always have these like these catchphrases.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it always focuses on young people. That's something your book really made me realize.

Speaker 1 I hadn't thought of it before, but they very seldom are talking about 50-year-olds or 40-something-year-olds or 60-year-olds, even.

Speaker 1 It's always focused on a peculiar thing that is happening in and around young people's sex. Like, why do you think that is? When you researched it, what did you find?

Speaker 2 Why do we love telling young people that they're doing sex wrong? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think that in a lot of ways, like controlling how young people have sex means you control the future.

Speaker 2 You can reset the narrative about what an American family should look like, what an American life should look like, how to be good in the United States, depending on how you condition young people to think about sex.

Speaker 2 I mean, I would also argue that there's probably some element amongst people as we get older and maybe lose more of our sex appeal that we feel like... Jealous.
Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like we want to control these young people who are sort of like, you know, rising up, flourishing, what have you. But I think that there is also a great political utility.

Speaker 2 in telling young people how to live their lives and in particular making them feel certain types of ways about sex and making them afraid of certain kinds of sex.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. I feel like you've you've nailed it.
And I guess that's why you are a great author.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know about great author, but thank you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You don't be, hey, you're Eugene Causer.
You don't forget that.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Trevor.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 I don't care what happens in your life. You never forget that, right? Yes, she's a great author.
Yeah. And you might be useless at everything, but you're still Eugene Causer.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 Your name has a.

Speaker 2 What did you say? Your name has a musicality. Yeah, musicality.
You don't forget that.

Speaker 5 Guys, I don't know how to say.

Speaker 5 I'm touched.

Speaker 1 I mean, thank you, Eugene.

Speaker 5 Thank you for seeing me, guys. We see you.

Speaker 2 You're welcome. We can all go now.
We're done here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What was your question?

Speaker 5 My thing is, you're absolutely right. It almost feels like

Speaker 5 sex,

Speaker 5 money, religion are the only levers that parents can still use to control their children.

Speaker 5 And once they've lost one, they'll try to cling on to another because while they're still your dependent, you can tell them what car to drive,

Speaker 5 how they must do at school because you are paying. Yeah.
And then you can also tell them, yeah, if you become morally corrupt by having sex, all of this goes away. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But I don't necessarily think, at least here, that it is parents that are passing on this messaging to young people, telling them that certain kinds of sex are bad or that they should be ashamed or afraid of certain kinds of sex.

Speaker 2 I think it is institutions. Like in general, most Americans believe that it is okay to teach young people about more than abstinence and sex ed.

Speaker 2 They do accept that premarital sex is a normal part of life.

Speaker 2 They would like their young children to know, well, maybe not young children, but they would like their children to be provided with age-appropriate,

Speaker 2 medically accurate information about things like condoms and STIs and pregnancy prevention.

Speaker 2 But what we see instead in this country is an extreme support among politicians and institutions for absence-only sex ed. The U.S.

Speaker 2 government has, since 2000, poured more than $2 billion into absence-only sex ed, which in general does not work. $2 billion.
$2 billion.

Speaker 1 Into convincing people that they should not have sex.

Speaker 2 Until marriage.

Speaker 1 $2 billion.

Speaker 5 We're in the wrong business.

Speaker 2 No?

Speaker 5 Who did I get? Did I get Trevor Noor or Trevor Weber?

Speaker 2 We're like, what did you judge me? $2 billion.

Speaker 2 It's, and I mean, and this continues under Democratic administrations. It's not like just Republican presidents are in favor of absence-only sex ed.

Speaker 2 Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing to absence-only sex ed.

Speaker 1 What is what is their like to play devil's advocate? What is their argument for? What is their intention? Before I assume anything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's true that absence is the only way to totally avoid getting things like STIs or getting pregnant. And

Speaker 2 but I think that that is not only the message that's communicated through absence-only sex ed.

Speaker 2 Like oftentimes absence-only sex ed has been embedded with specific notions around like who, what a man should be or what a woman should be or what a family should look like.

Speaker 2 And so I think for many of the advocates of absence-only sex ed, this is about creating a kind of American family that looks a lot like the American family of the 1950s, which is to say like two very young people getting married because in the 1950s, the average age of marriage dropped to an unprecedented, I think it was 20 for women and 22 for men.

Speaker 2 Wow. So it was a man and a woman get married.
They have 2.5 kids. Man works.
What's the point? Women stay at home.

Speaker 1 I've always, yeah, I've always loved that 0.5.

Speaker 5 But never in black families have I heard of a a 0.5.

Speaker 2 Never. It's always, maybe it's like the always the possibility of more children.
Well, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that's the point five. That's the half.

Speaker 1 Okay. Got it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I mean, implicit in this is the idea that this family is white because like this was not the reality for black families in the 1950s. This was how white families in the 1950s lived.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 They the white families had the two had the 0.5. And so I think that a lot of these absence-only advocates, like they're not just really talking about sex.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're talking about a lifestyle. They're talking about a way to be, a way to be perceived.

Speaker 2 They're talking about a way that they want the United States to look. Oh, damn.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 1 So when you dig into it, you know, like when I came across your work, it was around, there were all these headlines about the sex recession.

Speaker 1 That's what got me intrigued because I'd be reading the news and then all of a sudden I'd see a headline, sex recession. I was like, what is this?

Speaker 1 And you click into it and it was like, Gen Z are not having sex. They're having less sex than ever before.
The sex is going down. No sex for Gen Z.

Speaker 1 What does that mean for your children? And you'd see all these headlines.

Speaker 1 And you really,

Speaker 1 in truly one of the most brilliant ways, you break down what people are missing. Is that it's not a sex recession because like kids are like, oh, I'm no sex or I don't want sex.

Speaker 1 You go into the nuanced ideas in and around sex, intimacy, the responsibility, the bonds that that people have. What do you think people miss when they just go, Gen Z doesn't want to have sex?

Speaker 2 I think we take the idea of sex as being like good in and of itself for whatever reason.

Speaker 2 Even though there's so much shaming around sex, it's like treated as a bad thing, a knee-jerk bad thing, that the sex recession is going on.

Speaker 2 And I think we should be asking ourselves, like, to why does it matter? if young people aren't having sex. Because like, to be honest, I don't really care if young people are having sex or not.

Speaker 2 Like, what I care about is whether or not they are willing to be vulnerable, whether or not they learn skills like how to risk rejection and how to handle rejection and what it means to connect with other people, not just sexually, but platonically and romantically.

Speaker 2 And so, like, the reason I find all these headlines about the sex recession to be very interesting is because I think we don't actually interrogate what sex.

Speaker 2 is or means or the role that it plays in our lives, which goes back to this earlier question that you were asking about, like, what are we not talking about when we talk about sex?

Speaker 2 And I think that that's what we're not really talking about. And I think the way that the sex recession headline happens is it sounds really dramatic.

Speaker 2 And you can understand why people would avoid having sex because sex is kind of fun.

Speaker 2 But I think that it's

Speaker 2 kind of fun. I mean, I'm telling it well, kind of fun.
Kind of fun. Kind of fun.
I like it. I've had it.
I've enjoyed it in my time.

Speaker 2 You know. Kind of fun.

Speaker 2 Sex is kind of fun.

Speaker 1 That's a great sticker, by the way.

Speaker 2 Sex is kind of fun.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 fun. It's breaking news right here.

Speaker 2 I don't know if anyone's heard.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back after this short break.

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Speaker 5 Can we go back to the episode?

Speaker 1 So when you talk to Gen Z, when you talk to young men, young women, you know, however people identify, like across the board, people are saying that at that age, they generally have a different relationship to sex than maybe the mainstream would think they should have.

Speaker 1 But how do they express themselves?

Speaker 1 What do they say their views on sex are or aren't?

Speaker 1 What is happening from the inside?

Speaker 2 I mean, there's definitely no way.

Speaker 5 Nothing's happening on the inside.

Speaker 1 No, that's not what I meant, Eugene. That was a great joke, but that's not what I meant.
Sorry.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 I appreciate that. I love a sex pun.
I want to be really clear.

Speaker 2 I don't know if the headline or the title of the book made that clear, but

Speaker 2 I I mean, I think it's, it depends on who you're talking to. Like people, these young people, I interviewed more than 100 people under 30 for the book.

Speaker 2 And so like every conversation felt really different depending on where these people had come from and what their backgrounds were and, you know, how they identified their sexual orientation or their gender.

Speaker 2 But I think what was uniform amongst these young people is they really hadn't been asked a lot of the questions that I was asking them.

Speaker 2 They all, virtually all of them had had sex education that they thought was incompetent.

Speaker 2 There was a lot of references to, if you've seen the movie Mean Girls, you know how Coach Carr says, like, if you have sex, you will die.

Speaker 2 A lot of people, unprompted, brought up that exact analogy to me and said that that's what their sex ed was like.

Speaker 2 But then beyond that, they, a lot of them had never, they didn't have parents like mine. They couldn't talk to them about sex.

Speaker 2 They didn't have friends that they felt like they could speak openly about sex with.

Speaker 2 And so I think a lot of them enjoyed being able to have these in-depth conversations because each of these interviews ran like maybe 90 minutes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think particularly what I found was interesting, there was kind of a gender divide that happened,

Speaker 2 which is that a lot of the young women and also a lot of the queer folks I interviewed, they came to the table with more to say. Okay.

Speaker 2 They had thought about it, even if they hadn't had these conversations before.

Speaker 2 Whereas a lot of the young men I interviewed had not necessarily thought about or even like come to the table with things to talk about.

Speaker 2 And I thought that my theory around that is: I feel like the young women and the queer people had understood that their sexual desires or their interests maybe created more friction for them because, like, those desires, those interests were not treated as being as important as young men's interests, young straight men's interests.

Speaker 2 Whereas the young men, like they, it sort of took them longer to come to start thinking about some of this stuff because they hadn't really had to put as much thought into it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's interesting because society

Speaker 1 tells you you what your story is a lot of the time, you know? Yeah. So

Speaker 1 if I think of it from a young man's perspective, when you're a young man, you're sold a story of yourself.

Speaker 1 You're sold a story that tells you where you should be at a certain time, how you should be viewing sex, what you, and you think of like, there's like the fun version, like Super Bad, a movie like Super Bad, or for me growing up, American Pie.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? It's just this, you got to lose your virginity by prom, man. You got to lose it by prom, man.
Come on. You get what I'm saying? But there's this idea.

Speaker 1 And even in those stories and don't get me wrong those are comedy i'm not saying don't make them but society is telling you a story as a young man about your relationship with sex and what your relationship with sex means about you and your your success in life and i can only imagine you know if you're a woman uh you know if you're queer if you're any if you identify as anything you this is very different relationship and maybe maybe you have less influence and more room to think about it, but also less support maybe for lack of it.

Speaker 2 It's harder to make it real. Yeah.

Speaker 2 or to see it out in the real world there is this concept that i came across while i was uh reporting the book called hegemonic masculinity hegemonic masculinity yeah which is a sort of weighty word for i think something that people understand very easily which is that there are a lot of very narrow ideas about what a man should be yeah and like particularly when it comes to sex like men should be big strong tall emotionless cavemen who are good at obtaining sex and always want to have sex good at obtaining it yes And also want it.

Speaker 2 Also want it. So like there's not a lot of space in those stereotypes for men to have the feelings that they do have about sex.

Speaker 2 And I feel like we've done a very good job in the United States over the last 50 years of expanding the ways that we think about like women's relationship with sex in some ways.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 even if it's harder for those young girls that I was interviewing or the young queer folks I was interviewing, it's harder for them to see this out in the real world or they have to think about it more and they have all these ideas and like swirling around inside them.

Speaker 2 But like we haven't even created the space for men to start having those conversations or thinking about those stuff for themselves.

Speaker 2 And so when I was interviewing these young men, they talked a lot about dealing with those stereotypes and feeling like they had to be a particular kind of way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember having a conversation about this. It was,

Speaker 1 I forget where this was, but it was...

Speaker 1 There was a panel that was being hosted and there were some really interesting psychologists talking about it. And then afterwards, there's a little break off and everyone's just chatting.

Speaker 1 And one of the therapists there, they were a family therapist, sex therapists, all of this, they said something that stuck with me for years.

Speaker 1 They said, we've lived in a world where men have been taught that they only think about sex and sex has no feelings.

Speaker 1 And we've taught women that sex is only their feelings and it defines them as a human being. And, you know,

Speaker 1 it's the most valuable, powerful, like, oh, this is your. And so you have this imbalance where men go, stick it in, good times.
And then women are like, it is my sanctity.

Speaker 1 And she was saying that, no, no, no, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Men need to be taught that they do have an emotion.
They do have a little bit of a fear. They do have a connection.

Speaker 1 They do have a warmth. They do have a tenderness.
You get what I'm saying? And then women can also be taught like, hey, there's a liberation in going like, it is yours to wield as you please.

Speaker 1 It is not only your sanctity. It's just yours.
So, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 In the same way someone can choose to spend their Friday night drunk or reading a book, there's got to be a freedom in saying to people, Your sex is your sex, do with it as you please, and don't think that it defines you in like a singular forever.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 5 I think all of this is, and it makes total sense. I think all of this, much like anything else, is a byproduct of marketing.
I think sex products don't need to use sex to market anything anymore.

Speaker 5 For example, cigarette smoking,

Speaker 5 going um,

Speaker 5 remember those ads where you used to see guys and girls at the beach having a bonfire? Yeah,

Speaker 5 car ads. There's this famous Mustang one where there's a woman and the man and the arm over.
Have you noticed how car ads look now?

Speaker 5 It's usually one guy driving it being responsible, or it's like a family, yeah, yes, but it's never sexual.

Speaker 2 Car ads are wildly gendered, I have to say,

Speaker 2 they really are. Yeah, they'll pop up when I'm watching television.
I'm like, gosh, this is like, it's like a car for big, strong men or a car for families.

Speaker 2 Like, those are the two genders of cars.

Speaker 5 They don't sell the M3 or

Speaker 5 the whatever fancy super sports car with a man and a woman. The only time you see that is when you watching those videos of people in Monaco.
So now people have sold,

Speaker 5 brands have stopped being interested in selling sex to use, to sell a product.

Speaker 5 So I think now when kids that are younger, Gen Zs, look at this, just my opinion, when they look at the kind of women of the people that they idolize, they know they'll never have that woman.

Speaker 5 When they look at their favorite sports star, their favorite rapper, and they look at the kind of women that they're with, I don't think they see themselves with that kind of person.

Speaker 1 So you think that's affected how they see sex because of that?

Speaker 5 Yes, but that's why kids now, when you ask them, what do you want to be, they say, rich or famous.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 5 Because they know that's the only way to get the kind of girls that they want. Yes, because now the normal is not marketed anymore.
Because it's one or the other.

Speaker 5 It's either a guy, macho, macho guy in a car by himself,

Speaker 5 or you have a whole guy with five kids and the person's like, I'm 16.

Speaker 1 I don't want, I don't want either of these. Yeah, I don't want to have sex.

Speaker 5 Must it come with these ones?

Speaker 2 I mean, but it's interesting, though, because young people are growing up on

Speaker 2 an internet that is saturated with sex. Like they're being exposed to so many more different kinds of sexuality

Speaker 2 than you ever had growing up. I mean, I'm 31, so I grew up a bit on the internet, but not in the way that young people are now.

Speaker 2 And so I think that this is also sort of one of the questions that perplexes people with.

Speaker 2 the sex recession is like, how is it possible that young people are running into like every possible kind of sex that they want and probably a few that they don't on the internet and yet not having IRL sex.

Speaker 2 And so, I think that it's really hard to say what the messaging is that young people are getting around sex right now because the world of the internet is just full of all kinds of different sex.

Speaker 1 Is that part of the problem, though?

Speaker 1 Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 It is. You know,

Speaker 1 when we think about sex,

Speaker 1 and you talk about this in the book, it is pretty crazy that one of the most important aspects of your life as a human being, something that will stick with you until you probably leave this planet, is not taught to you in any formal way.

Speaker 1 Like, yes, you can say the sex ed, but you know, as you as you write and as we've seen, sex ed has dropped its

Speaker 1 window that it thinks of sex through. So it tells you, like, the

Speaker 1 physical function of sex. This is a penis, it goes into a vagina.

Speaker 5 We're still from Africa, eh?

Speaker 2 And so, no, but I'm saying, saying like when you think of that,

Speaker 1 what do you think that's also done to

Speaker 1 not that it was better per se, but there's a flattening of sex and its educ and the education that goes around it.

Speaker 2 It means that you have to go to the internet.

Speaker 1 That doesn't equip people with the tools to know what sex encompasses.

Speaker 2 Right. Because all they hear in school is like, don't have sexual die.
Yes. And then they open up their phone or their laptop or whatever, and then they see porn.

Speaker 2 I mean, three-quarters of American teenagers have seen porn by the time they're they're 18.

Speaker 2 And so I think, and what porn purports to do is like show you what sexual pleasure looks like and what it feels like to give it and what it feels like to receive it.

Speaker 2 And so especially if you are coming from a school that teaches you next to nothing about sex, like, of course, porn is going to feel like, oh, well, this is sex ed. This is what I should use instead.

Speaker 2 And like young people do say like, oh, I know that porn is not accurate. And yet they still rely on it for this.

Speaker 5 But what does it not tell you? So if I'm, if a kid is watching porn thinking, oh man, this looks like so much fun, what is it not telling them?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's not telling them a lot. Like, cause porn is scripted, right? Yeah.
It's basically. What? I know.
I'm so sorry. I'm yet again breaking news here on the podcast.

Speaker 5 Mr. Pinas over here is surprised.

Speaker 2 Captain Pinas.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's basically like, I use this analogy in the book, but it's basically like if you learn to drive by playing playing Grand Theft Auto. Right.

Speaker 2 It's just not, it has very little to do with what real life sex looks like. And what does cut a real life sex? Because obviously it's ban bang choo.

Speaker 5 Wee hee swing from the chandeliers.

Speaker 2 Please send me a link. Please send me that link.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Please send me that link, Eugene.
I got you, fam. We'll put that in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Let's get that link to everyone.

Speaker 2 I want to watch that video. It sounds acrobatic.

Speaker 1 It really sounds fantastic.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And classy.
There's a chandelier. Oh, yeah.
This was a really nice set that they probably.

Speaker 2 It's called circ de soleil.

Speaker 2 Oh, soleil.

Speaker 1 I see what you did there. Nicely done.

Speaker 2 Wow. Oh, nicely done.
You need to catch up on the sex patterns, by the way. I don't feel like you're really pulling your weight.

Speaker 5 So if that's advertised clearly through these clips that they watch and these movies that they watch, what is the reality of it?

Speaker 5 Because we're so quick to say, that's not realistic, but what's the realistic part of it?

Speaker 2 What is realistic about porn?

Speaker 5 No, what is realistic about sex that porn is not showing people?

Speaker 2 Oh, I mean, it's not showing like communication.

Speaker 2 It's not showing, I mean, I think the things that make people good at sex are an ability to communicate, having a sense of humor, a willingness to be awkward, because like, let's be honest, sex, in addition to being kind of fun, is usually fairly inelegant.

Speaker 2 And like, none of those things are present in porn because porn is very sleek and and scripted. And these are professionals operating on a closed track.

Speaker 2 And that's fine. I really don't want the message from me or from the book to be that porn is bad.
It's just porn has very little to do with the way people and particularly young people fuck around.

Speaker 2 And so what I found was interesting in the book is I kind of had thought that young people on the right would be opposed to porn.

Speaker 2 I thought that young people on the left would have better feelings about it. But what I found inside is that young people almost routinely thought that porn was bad for them.

Speaker 2 And they felt that it had warped their sexuality. There's this concept in sociology called the deep story, which is basically the story that people feel is true.

Speaker 2 And that story can have more power than the actual facts. And we see this in politics all the time, right?

Speaker 2 People vote for the guy who they just have a good feeling about, even if he doesn't actually align with any of your opinions.

Speaker 2 And so the deep story among young people is that porn has been very bad for them.

Speaker 2 And they feel like, in particular, because they can't talk to their parents about sex or their friends and because sex ed has so failed them that they're just stranded in front of all of this pornography and they've just been left to deal with it on their own in particular one of the things that really stuck with me is they really felt that porn had normalized rough sex and in particular choking if you're under 40 you're almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex as someone

Speaker 2 if you're under 40 compared to people over 40. And like, if you like choking, that's fine.
Just do it safely and consensually.

Speaker 2 And the thing is that most people, or many people, I should say, are not asked for consent before they're choked. And choking is, you know, it can be strangulation.
It can be actually very dangerous.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah.
And so it was fascinating to me to talk to these young people. And they would, so many of the young women I talked to just would relay spontaneously that they had been choked during sex.

Speaker 2 Like there was one young woman who told me that, you know, they called it a love squeeze in her high school. And again, it's just one of those things where if you like it, go for it.

Speaker 2 But it's not a normal part of sex. It's not like an average part of sex.
And you do have to have a real conversation about it before you do it. And that's just not something you see in porn.

Speaker 1 Yeah. As you're saying this, I realize

Speaker 1 the paradox of not having a thought out

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 centralized form of education means that the normal becomes defined by the abnormal.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I mean? Because you just said choking is not normal. And then I went, except when it is.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Because everything that's in sex was not normal at some point. I remember when I was, how old was I? I think I was 12 or 13 years old.
And I remember seeing,

Speaker 1 it was like distant aunts and uncles, but they kissed using their tongues. And I remember my mind was like, what just, I'd never seen adults do that.

Speaker 1 Like, because at that time in my life, that was not normal. Even in TV shows, people kissed.
It was just like a smooch. You just just plucked your lips and you camera swirls around them.

Speaker 2 The camera just kissed. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? And then one day there were tongues and there were more tongues and there were more tongues.

Speaker 1 But now, if you said to somebody, kissing with your tongue is not normal, they'll go like, What are you talking about? That's that's weird that you're not opening your mouth. What's wrong with you?

Speaker 1 So the paradox then becomes that normal does exist, or rather, like the Overton window of normal exists. But what's really wrong is how it's being defined.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like if nobody's talking about

Speaker 1 the thing that's not happening in porn, then porn becomes the only teacher in essence.

Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Well, the thing is, they're also like, they're not even really talking about it either. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Silence is just like $2 billion to be quiet.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. And so they're just, they're not even talking about it.
And it's going on behind closed doors. And, you know, there's been like, I was reading.

Speaker 2 stories and studies where like women would talk about having a guy without asking us his belt around their neck. Use his what? His belt.
His belt.

Speaker 1 Yes. Oh, geez.

Speaker 2 Or like a necklace to choke her. And it's like, you know, these are things that can be dangerous.
Yeah, yeah. And if you like it, do it safely, circumstancially again.

Speaker 2 But we're not really, as the internet has shown us more and more different kinds of sex and maybe help normalize more and more different kinds of sex, sex education has receded as a resource that people can find in institutions.

Speaker 1 I also think there's a, there's a, there's an ex, like, um,

Speaker 1 There's almost an amplification effect that can happen with algorithms and social media.

Speaker 1 Because you, you're saying this, and I'm thinking about all the videos young men see where women are mocking them for the type of boring sex they have. Do you know, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's not abnormal to see like young men going, oh yeah, like, like you still out here, like you'll see these videos, and I'm not blaming those people.

Speaker 1 You make whatever video you want to make, but you'll see some of these videos where they'd be like, oh, yeah, when he still wants to hug you before da-da-da, and you know, it's like a little TikTok, and it's, and it is funny, but I can also imagine being a young man and going, oh man, I guess I've got to know this stuff.

Speaker 1 Because if I don't know it, do I know sex?

Speaker 1 And do I want to be mocked? And do I want to be teased? And do I want to be to rewind to back in my day? But I remember in high school how

Speaker 1 boys, and obviously I wasn't spending all the time with the girls, but how boys particularly were mocked if they didn't like seem to know things.

Speaker 1 And back then, it was much less sex-based, but it was still, do you know how to do that? Do you know how to finger somebody?

Speaker 2 And it was like, ugh,

Speaker 1 And it's like, if you don't know, exactly like that, Eugene. See, I taught you well.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this podcast is not sex ed. I just see.

Speaker 5 You said $1 billion.

Speaker 2 You had us there. Yeah, you had us there.

Speaker 2 $2 billion. We're coming for that billion.

Speaker 1 We're doing our best here. But no, what I, yeah, it's, it's.

Speaker 1 Do you see what I mean? The conundrum is.

Speaker 1 You're in a world where

Speaker 1 it's,

Speaker 1 as you so eloquently say, you've got women who who are saying oh man this is my experience of the men and what they're doing and I also go yeah there's a world where the men are going this is my experience of what I've been told a woman likes and because I don't meet a woman until I'm having sex with her I don't know actually what the thing is and I don't want to get there and then not know what the thing is and you don't want to be the fumbling guy and then what so to your point because the the original sin is committed by not having the education everyone is now bumping.

Speaker 1 It's the blind leading the blind.

Speaker 2 Well, it also, I mean, it goes back to what we're talking about with like these stereotypes of masculinity, where it's this idea that men have to know everything about sex and should be good at sex.

Speaker 2 And like, there's no room for men to ask questions, including of their partner, which is the person they should be directing these questions at, because it's seen as not being cool, including oftentimes by women.

Speaker 2 It's not like, oh, men are just telling men to be this way.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of messaging from all kinds of areas, including from women, at men, to tell them to be a particular kind of way when it comes to sex.

Speaker 2 And I should say. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was also explain like porn is not a monolith.
And a lot of the young women I talked to,

Speaker 2 the kind of porn that they liked wasn't video porn. It was something like erotica or fan fiction or romance novels, which oftentimes can also feature rough sex.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 because they also had this idea of like rough sex from those forms of pornography, like they brought that to the table as well.

Speaker 2 And so if these young men are watching video porn where rough sex is being normalized and these women are reading porn where rough sex is being normalized, the story that young women were telling me and the story that young men were telling me and the sort of deep story among young people is like, that's how rough sex becomes just treated as just another kind of sex and not something you need to have a conversation about.

Speaker 2 And I should also say, I do want to say, we actually don't really know what porn does to us. Like the science on porn is incredibly muddied.

Speaker 2 It's very hard to find a control group these days of people who haven't seen internet porn.

Speaker 1 Oh, geez. Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 2 So, you know, to the extent that this is the story that's being told, I find that valuable and I find that interesting, but we don't actually know from a scientific perspective exactly what is happening to us and our sex lives because of the proliferation of internet porn.

Speaker 5 I think from just listening to you and the research that you've done, the people that you've spoken to, I think the whole entire world is missing a big part of what sex education should be.

Speaker 5 Instead of sex health education, they should focus more on sex mental health education.

Speaker 5 Their ability to connect or disconnect should the act not go right.

Speaker 5 Because I feel like a lot of men, I mean, young men who grew up to be men and how they view relationships, it's usually having to prove yourself.

Speaker 5 And then finally, when the act is done, you realize you don't have to be someone that you are not all along because, again, of the romanticization of relationships and the end goal being sex.

Speaker 5 And on the other end, it's the, now that we've done it, let's talk.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, advocates of comprehensive sex, I would say, like healthy relationship education is also a part of sex ed.
Yeah. Healthy relationships.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like how to talk about your relationships, your feelings, the sex you want to be having, like that could also be a part of sex ed.

Speaker 2 And honestly, the first time someone said that to me, I was like, my mind has been blown.

Speaker 2 But because I thought I had pretty good sex ed. Like my sex ed, I'm from Seattle, Washington, which is a very liberal place.

Speaker 2 And it talked about SGIs and it talked about condoms and it talked about pregnancy prevention. But it did do its best to pathologize sex.

Speaker 2 Like they had us watch a video of, I think this woman was giving birth to a 16 pound baby, which is huge. It's large.
Yeah. What's the point of that video other than to make me afraid? Traumatize you.

Speaker 2 I would love to track down the woman from that video and be like, what's up?

Speaker 2 Why did you participate in this?

Speaker 1 That's one way to learn.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it didn't include. Like, they made sex seem scary, even if they were trying to provide me with the resources, much more so than other schools do.

Speaker 2 And they didn't talk about like, and here's how to talk to your partner, or here's how to talk to someone you might be interested in, about not only sex, but about just the relationship.

Speaker 1 Is part of this because parents are also saying, I don't want my kids learning about sex? Because you see that happening more and more in America.

Speaker 1 And I mean, but it flares up all over the world at different times. Parents will say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Hey. You don't know.
You don't tell my kid anything.

Speaker 1 And there's many parents who, I think, very naively think if they don't hear about it, they won't know it exists. You know, but how much of it is that?

Speaker 1 How much of it is like we sort of blame the schooling system, but parents oftentimes can shake what a schooling system does or doesn't teach.

Speaker 2 I think it's a vocal minority of

Speaker 2 parents who feel the way that you're describing. And I think we especially see that in the United States post-2020 and post-the pandemic,

Speaker 2 where we've always had a lot of conversations around sex and ed and a lot of fighting around sex ed here in the U.S.

Speaker 2 But post-2020, I would say that those fights have reached a new level where people at school board meetings, for example, have just started spouting off things that have nothing to do with reality.

Speaker 2 So I describe in the book,

Speaker 2 there was in 2020 a school board meeting in Texas because Texas was changing its sex ed curriculum for the first time in two decades.

Speaker 2 And during this school board meeting, parents were coming up and talking about things that I mean, I struggled to even understand what they were saying because it didn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 Like they were talking about, I kept on having to rewind and be like, am I hearing hearing this right?

Speaker 2 But they were talking about like, you know, teachers grooming students and teachers grooming students not only for sex, but into being transgender, which is not a thing.

Speaker 2 And they were talking about, oh, comprehensive sex ed is just a way to, you know, make students gay or trans and consent. even of itself, consent even by itself is a gateway word is what one

Speaker 2 actually school board member said where they were saying like, this is a gateway word so that like, I believe he said that like Planned Parenthood and NAMBLA, the male, was it man-boy student, man-boy,

Speaker 2 national man-boy, a National American Man-Boy Love Association. Sorry, that took me a minute.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 To like, consent is a gateway word so that those organizations, Planned Parenthood, NAMBLA, et cetera, can sink their hooks into these young people.

Speaker 2 And I'm paraphrasing what he said, but it was a very staggering thing to hear. Right.
And obviously, it doesn't have anything to do with reality.

Speaker 2 And so it got to the point where it's like, like, oh, we can't even necessarily talk about consent in schools because that is a politicized word at this point.

Speaker 1 The tough thing is it doesn't have to do, you know, to go back to what you're saying about like a slither of porn, a slither of people.

Speaker 1 I truly feel bad for those parents because I think they sort of care the most.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Think of what you must feel like as a parent. You're watching the news, you see a story about a teacher who had sex with one of their students, man or woman.

Speaker 1 You see another story where teachers had sex with their students. You see a story where this child was kidnapped or this child was this.
You see, you see a story of grooming.

Speaker 1 You see people come out and say they were groomed from a young age.

Speaker 1 It's so hard to say to that person, because I, and I've been guilty of this, don't get me wrong, because I would dismissively go, that's not a thing.

Speaker 1 But then I'm like, oh man, but how do you get through to people?

Speaker 1 Or how do you help them balance out

Speaker 1 the weighting of risk? because they're saying i'm trying to protect my child at all costs

Speaker 1 and then you want to go yes but what cost is too great at what point are you not protecting the child you know because it is a tough one because there are teachers who've molested kids there are kids who you know what i mean it's this i mean the world is a scary place and schools are a scary place

Speaker 1 it's funny i don't think the world is a scary place in that way no genuinely and i i don't mean this like facetiously i just think the world feels scarier when you know everything that is happening in it at this at the same time.

Speaker 1 But most of the world is not a scary place. You know, like people are like, oh, I'm scared of flying, but they're scared of flying because of the plane crashes we focused on.

Speaker 1 But there's no news story about planes that land.

Speaker 1 They just aren't, you know, and we do this with everything.

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying we shouldn't focus on those things, but the human brain is very difficult at understanding how much or how little to focus on something, depending on how much it's been told to us.

Speaker 2 Well, I think also during the pandemic in particular, people were trapped at home on their computers, looking constantly at bad news and conspiracy theories proliferate. You said bad nudes.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 I was like, I've had those during the pandemic. Trapped with bad news.

Speaker 5 I was like, hey, man, I've had

Speaker 2 there's nothing worse than lockdown with bad news. Lockdown on itself.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, I know those are runner of razors. Now, you.

Speaker 1 Actually, let's talk about social media because you talk about what you call the fuckability trap.

Speaker 2 You know, hey, hey, Carter. I'm sorry.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 I didn't realize that was approval. Thank you.

Speaker 5 That.

Speaker 1 What is it again? The fuckability trap.

Speaker 2 I mean, I have to credit fuckability is not my concept. It's the concept of this philosopher whose name I'm definitely going to mispronounce.
It's Amia Sebastian. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 So sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. But she is

Speaker 2 a philosopher who talks about basically fuckability is sexual desire as constructed by our

Speaker 2 politics,

Speaker 2 which is the idea that like, you know, how can we differentiate the ways that like racism and sexism and all other kinds of isms affect which bodies are seen as most desirable?

Speaker 2 So that's the definition of the fuckability trap. I don't know where you're going with the actual.

Speaker 1 No, but the trap that you were talking about.

Speaker 2 And you see,

Speaker 1 this is where I like I get stuck because it's so complicated and layered. You talk about social media and how

Speaker 1 we're given these signals.

Speaker 1 We're shown these signals. Post a picture of yourself,

Speaker 1 you know, just sitting in a park drinking your coffee. Yeah, get a few likes.
Post the same picture in a bikini.

Speaker 1 Likes go up. Go back to a picture of you reading a book.
A few likes.

Speaker 1 Bikini, likes go up.

Speaker 2 Am I reading in the bikini in this case?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's good.

Speaker 2 I mean, look,

Speaker 2 everybody wants to be smart and hot. Like, that's the goal.
That is the goal.

Speaker 1 Can I tell you, we need to normalize that, by the way.

Speaker 5 I'm not jealous of that line because I wish I had to.

Speaker 2 No, but it's true, though.

Speaker 1 No, I like this because I feel like we make it seem like it has to be one or the other. We make it seem like we also make it seem like it shouldn't exist.
And maybe

Speaker 1 that goes into this conversation,

Speaker 1 but what did you notice in how social media has played a role in how we define ourselves? and portray ourselves in society in and around sex.

Speaker 2 I think it is exactly what you're talking about with the bikini photos and the ways that those are valued more.

Speaker 2 So there was one young man I was talking to, and I appreciated that he said this, where he was talking about, you know, if he might see a girl that he likes on Instagram, he might keep scrolling and see another girl he likes, but she'll be in a bikini.

Speaker 2 And he's like, well, I'm probably going to like her more. Like he's going to be more into her.

Speaker 2 And that's, I think, this thing that people have internalized, which is that they understand their sexual value and how to convey it online because they're constantly getting feedback in the form of likes and matches and follower accounts.

Speaker 2 And they can quantify what makes them appear to be sexually desirable to other people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, appear to be being the key phrase. Right.

Speaker 2 And I think for young people who grow up constantly having that kind of feedback loop, it leads to a kind of self-objectification where they don't think about their bodies and what their bodies can do for them.

Speaker 2 They think about what their bodies look like and how other people think about their bodies.

Speaker 2 And that feeling is linked to all kinds of negative outcomes like eating disorders or low self-esteem or even potentially people having less sex. Because,

Speaker 2 you know, if sex is another occasion for you to be judged and found wanting, you're not going to do it.

Speaker 2 If you feel like your body is perfect, has to look perfect in order to get naked, you're probably just not going to get naked.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think I think about when I was young. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We thought the worst thing, you know, when society was talking about this, the worst thing was the magazines have very perfect bodies and perfect people. What does this mean to you?

Speaker 1 And we thought that that's the worst it could get. But now you're on the cover of your own magazine and no one's buying your magazine.
Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, what does that mean?

Speaker 2 And you can see it now. Yeah.
That would be devastating.

Speaker 1 But that's what's happening. Think about it.
Yeah, it is. Because before, you could go, like, oh, that's a supermodel.
And I'm not that. And that's the beauty standard.

Speaker 1 But the judgment wasn't about you. You knew what people were aspiring to, and you knew where you were maybe in relation to it, but it wasn't about you.
But now it's completely about you.

Speaker 1 Because now you've put your magazine right next to somebody else's magazine online, and then a little button tells you how your magazine stacks up against somebody else's.

Speaker 1 And so now it's, it's not just an aspirational thing that you cannot reach.

Speaker 5 It's a realistic one.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 You see it here, right here and right now.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And, you know, also we've been given, young people have been giving many more tools to make themselves appear more attractive.
God damn.

Speaker 2 There was one young woman I was talking to who was talking about, you know, she posts on TikTok a lot and she took somebody else's filter and she didn't realize that the filter had made her cheeks look slimmer and when she accidentally removed the filter she realized oh i don't like my face this way i don't like the way my face actually looks i liked it with the filter more yeah catfished herself yeah i mean kind of and she was saying like that's a terrible feeling yeah like looking at your own face and then being disappointed by it and so not only are you like you're given all the tools to change how your body looks on social media can't really change your body in the same way without a lot more money and probably some surgery in real life.

Speaker 2 And so you're, again, just constantly being compared and contrasted and falling short.

Speaker 1 Could that be one of the things? I don't know. I haven't done any research in this field, but could that be one of the factors?

Speaker 1 If people are living in a world where they're able to augment themselves so perfectly online, could it prevent them from interacting in real life? Because

Speaker 1 to your, what you just said, the catfishing of it all,

Speaker 1 I know how I look online.

Speaker 1 I don't want to show up in person because I can't do anything. There's no filter.

Speaker 1 I can't match it. And so if I stay online, I never get disappointed.
I keep accruing this feeling and this, you know, but if I come into the real world, it all, it all falls apart.

Speaker 1 Did you speak to anyone where that happened? Were there people who were more comfortable existing as their full filter selves and then wouldn't go into the real world anymore?

Speaker 2 I think that what has happened for young people is like just so much more of their lives has been outsourced online. And the pandemic contributed to this, right?

Speaker 2 Because these are young people who are growing up, like they didn't have prom.

Speaker 2 They didn't have graduation.

Speaker 5 Missed a few years of school.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they missed a lot of the sort of The normative moments. Yeah, the ways that the moments that teach you how to handle being embarrassed or being rejected or just the nuances of human connection.

Speaker 2 And so instead, they were on their screens all the time. And that for them replaced a lot of those interactions.
But there's nothing that can really replace an irony. Real life battle experience.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 5 I'm a big fan, me personally, of real life battle experience. And I feel like there's nothing that will make you tougher and nicer at the same time than being done a favor

Speaker 5 instead of being rejected. Cut, I'm going to tell you the truth.

Speaker 5 There's some moment back in my life where I look back and I'm like, why did you date me?

Speaker 5 But you know what it did for my self-esteem? It took it from here to that. That was a real battle.
And also, so I've decided every year I do charity drive. I date someone who I wouldn't.

Speaker 5 It's my outreach.

Speaker 2 That's so generous of you. Yeah.

Speaker 5 I write it off with my taxes. I'm like, no, there's this time I will never get back.

Speaker 2 You are a philanthropy.

Speaker 5 A few tanks of gas that I use. And I put my credit card.
I write it off.

Speaker 2 And I'm going, okay, this is my corporate social responsibility.

Speaker 5 So that that person goes home, what they'll do is they'll say to themselves, if that guy saw me, then someone else can see me. And we laugh,

Speaker 5 but there's a lot of marriages that I think. are based on my theory because now people are like, you know who I dated.
You know, they look at me going, I dated that guy. And the person behaves.

Speaker 2 No, I love that idea that they're using you as the metric. So they go like, I'm just picturing a couple right now.

Speaker 1 And then the husband is saying something. I don't know if this is working for you.

Speaker 2 Working for you? Do you know how I used to date? And then they pull up your profile and like, hmm? It's like, you dated him. Yeah.
Why is he wearing a bikini and reading a book in the park?

Speaker 2 He's smart and hot. Yeah.

Speaker 5 So, but that's my thing.

Speaker 1 But you're right. No, but I do like the point, Piano, which is beautiful.
And we forget that it's all real life. Yes.
We often will say like the bad and the, but man, the good of real life as well.

Speaker 1 Being real life accepted, being real life chosen.

Speaker 2 Yes. Whew.

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, there's nothing to replace it, for sure.

Speaker 5 Nothing to replace the feeling of being told, look, man, I'm out of your league and I've realized that I can do better in life.

Speaker 5 And then at that moment, you feel, you know, shattered, broken, but you go, look, if I were you, I would totally do the same. And then you move on and then you start punching in your weight class.

Speaker 5 And when you're in your weight class, you're like, no man i actually can do better than you and that but i think the craft macra of relationships is what's missing it's it's the end goal has become the win where people i've heard people saying why would i want to go out there and meet people where i could be sitting here watching porn yeah yeah i've heard people saying that yeah so i feel like the the close quarter combatness of dating that eventually leads to sex the adventure of it all has been has been taken out It's all outcome-based.

Speaker 5 Yeah. It's Netflix and chill.
And then we skip to URL. And then we come back again.

Speaker 5 And then now you're talking to your friends online, you're watching girls that you will never have online, you're watching people having a good time online.

Speaker 5 Where else, with us, you had to go out there and be rejected. So, that's why my outreach program is still continuing till this day.
I

Speaker 1 it's so beautiful, Eugene. Thank you, Trevor.
So beautiful, thank you. I'm touched, and I think inspired as well.

Speaker 5 I think a lot of people don't consider imagine what kind of impact you would have

Speaker 5 with your reach,

Speaker 5 with

Speaker 2 your

Speaker 5 everything,

Speaker 5 you can just,

Speaker 5 the impact. I mean, you can have one in Harlem, the Bronx.

Speaker 5 Even in Africa, you can definitely do an outreach where a person can say, look who I took yourself, and look, I dated this person. And then you can just lift up your self-esteem one girl at a time.

Speaker 5 Sometimes a man here and there.

Speaker 5 But if anyone can do both.

Speaker 5 I've seen the things you do when no one is looking.

Speaker 1 Thank you for seeing me, Eugene. Thank you so much for seeing me.

Speaker 5 I've got you.

Speaker 1 That's me almost crying.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Beautiful.

Speaker 5 Over to you, Gutenberg.

Speaker 2 Oh, thank you.

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Speaker 1 Let's talk about sexting.

Speaker 1 Throughout time,

Speaker 1 the way humans have expressed their sexuality has constantly evolved and changed.

Speaker 1 And you spent a section in the book talking about like, you know, like how people see sexting and what it should be and how they communicate their sexuality to each other.

Speaker 1 What would you say has been the biggest change for like Gen Z from what a previous generation might have considered what's appropriate, not appropriate, what they're doing or not doing?

Speaker 1 Has there been a shift?

Speaker 2 I mean, it might be sexting yeah i think that you know when i was growing up my parents were always like you know everything you put online be prepared for the new york times to publish on its front page oh wow i know really puts the fear of the new york times into you um

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 now i think like everybody sends nudes yeah and that's just how it is and i think that there is a much more generational acceptance that like yeah probably you know, depending on the future of American democracy, if we end up having a younger president, that president will probably have nudes out there.

Speaker 2 And that's just how it is.

Speaker 2 And so I don't think that sexting is an inherently bad thing. I think it gets stigmatized a lot of the time because it's new and because it's lewd.

Speaker 1 But one day it could be the norm.

Speaker 1 Ask not what pictures your president can send to you. Ask what pictures you can send to your president.

Speaker 5 The best Kennedy ever.

Speaker 2 Even the Kennedy with a bad radio radio speaker.

Speaker 2 Kennedy's like, I've never started a match.

Speaker 2 I mean, look, if any president got a lot of nudes, it was probably Kennedy. Let's be honest.

Speaker 2 I knew you had it in you.

Speaker 2 But yeah, and I don't think that I think that we just, like porn, treat sexing as a monolith and treat it as a bad thing.

Speaker 2 And the thing is, though, that by in so doing, similar to how we pathologize sex through sex ed, we make it impossible for people to handle it when something does go wrong.

Speaker 2 We don't create avenues for people to be able to seek accountability or to even feel better about themselves when their nudes are leaked or shared, oftentimes without their consent.

Speaker 2 And that kind of stuff happens all the time. And we just blame those people for having sent out the nudes instead of recognizing everybody sends nudes.

Speaker 2 And actually leaking somebody else's nudes without their consent is a violation.

Speaker 1 But to your point, the difficulty, and I think this is something we struggle with in society across the board,

Speaker 1 we love flipping between binaries. Yeah.
You know, and we think the equilibrium gets reached when we go to the opposite end of a spectrum, but it doesn't, you know?

Speaker 1 So people will go, oh, this is unequal. And let's switch to the complete opposite.
Now it's, then it's like, no, now it's an unequal the other way. You know?

Speaker 5 And I remember, like, I think of goes from exclusive to super inclusive.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's like, but, but if you think of the

Speaker 1 Nelson Mandela, for instance, a lot of people wondered why he said,

Speaker 1 he was like, I do not seek the oppression of black people. I do not seek the oppression of white people.
I do not. And people were like, why is he saying that?

Speaker 1 Because he was like, I want to be crystal clear with you. I'm fighting for equality.
I'm not fighting for a role reversal.

Speaker 1 And sometimes people miss that. And I think when you're saying that.

Speaker 1 To go back to what your parents said, that is one of the dichotomies that we also face in this world.

Speaker 1 One half of sending nudes and your nudes getting leaked is not your fault because somebody leaked your nudes.

Speaker 1 One half is your fault because you've sent nudes. Now, I'm not saying you deserve it.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that.

Speaker 1 But I'm saying there's like, we don't want to live in a world where there's nuance. We don't want to live in a world where there's grave.

Speaker 1 But I think it's important for us to say to each other and to the parents and to also go like, hey, hey, hey, please know you are making it more likely.

Speaker 1 that a nude can be i'm not saying it's good if it happens here and i'm not saying you deserve it and i'm saying should but just understand that there's a risk that you're taking.

Speaker 1 But on the other hand, even if that risk, if you are a victim of that, I'm not going to now blame you. Yes.
But understand like the complicated ramifications of this thing, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I think in the flipping from one side to the other, like you just, it's a rejection of reality because reality is always in the middle.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And so we can't actually acknowledge or grapple with the nuances of reality if we're constantly moving from one extreme to the other. Oh, I like that actually.

Speaker 5 I'd even say it's the language that people use to not make that a crime. People call it revenge porn.
You're like, no, porn is an industry.

Speaker 5 It's a business with actors, with willing participants, with incentives. Someone leaking your nudes is not revenge porn.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because it was porn at all. Because it was never porn.

Speaker 2 At all.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So I think the wording around it gives these tech companies plausible deniability because once they get dragged into what they allow someone else to do as a proxy of someone else's

Speaker 5 willingness, then they'll be in trouble. Right.

Speaker 2 Well, there's new, I mean, advocates now would say instead of using revenge porn, we should use terms like non-consensual image abuse. Oh, yeah, there you go.
There you go. Yeah, you nailed it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And acknowledge, yes, to your point, like porn is an industry. People participate in it for money.
It's their job. Like someone who's nudes leaks, that is not them agreeing to be a performer.

Speaker 2 That is them being victimized.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a completely different thing. And now we've made it seem like they're part of an industry that they're not.

Speaker 1 How do we expand that into the world of dealing with sex and the way we think about it?

Speaker 1 You know, you talk in the book about college campuses and how there's this swing that goes back and forth in how college campuses have dealt and then are now dealing with sex that is consensual or non-consensual or somewhere in this gray area on campus.

Speaker 1 What have you found

Speaker 1 has happened in the past few years?

Speaker 2 I think in general, college campuses are oftentimes treated as like ground zero for all of the kinds of battles that we're having in American life.

Speaker 2 Like right now, for example, there's a lot of discussion around free speech on college campuses and what we should do there. But one of the things that I was looking at in the book is Title IX.

Speaker 2 And Title IX is the federal civil rights law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

Speaker 2 And it has become a political football over how we should be treating

Speaker 2 sex and rape on college campuses, which is to say, like under the Obama administration, it was, its powers were, I don't want to say expanded, but maybe more illuminated to the extent that you could use Title IX to combat sexual harassment and sexual abuse.

Speaker 2 And that sparked a huge backlash from the right that said that, you know, this was overreached by the Obama administration.

Speaker 2 And for example, they took specific aim at the standard of proof that the Obama administration said that should be used in adjudicating these kinds of cases.

Speaker 2 And so then when the Trump administration came in, they changed a lot of the rules around Title IX and they rewrote them to, for example, make it that you have to have like in-person hearings around these kinds of things where both the survivor, the alleged survivor, and the alleged perpetrator have to be there.

Speaker 2 And this, amongst other changes, made it, as one activist told me, basically Title IX became unusable for survivors. It just did not.
It's in a kangaroo court. I mean, that's that.

Speaker 2 I mean, they basically, the Trump administration said that you guys made Title IX a kangaroo court first, and then we're fixing it.

Speaker 1 We're going the opposite direction.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And then, so, like, basically, it's now

Speaker 2 at this point, the Biden administration rolled in. They again rewrote the rules of Title IX.
Trump administration, as people might have heard, is back in power. And wait, what? I know.
Oh,

Speaker 2 how long have we been in here?

Speaker 2 I mean, what is interesting is there are things

Speaker 2 There are things in the book that I predicted would change under a Trump administration, and Title IX was one of them, but I did not predict the speed at which a lot of this stuff would change.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 So, like, in between, I mean, writing a book takes time.

Speaker 2 In between turning in the final draft and the book actually coming out, some of the stuff that I predicted would happen over the course of a four-year Trump administration happened more or less immediately.

Speaker 2 And so, the Title IX rules have reverted at this point to what they were underneath the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 And I think for a lot of survivors on college campuses, it's been very difficult and upsetting to see like sex effectively being treated as a political football and not really being, the nuances of it not really being reckoned with, just people, again, flipping from one side to the other.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think

Speaker 2 we have to think about like, what is a college campus? Like a college campus is where people go and learn about the world.

Speaker 2 And if they're being taught at that age that maybe there are not consequences for sexual abuse, for sexual harassment, for rape, like what does that say for the rest of their lives?

Speaker 2 Sex or rape is one of the

Speaker 2 rape is one of the number one reasons that women leave college campuses. Damn no way.
And so when that happens, we're creating a situation where women are less able to flourish.

Speaker 2 They're not able to get the education. They're not able to get the jobs.
They're not able to ultimately have as much of a public voice.

Speaker 2 And so we create like a snowball effect here when we we don't take sexual abuse and harassment on college campuses seriously in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 1 It's also,

Speaker 1 I always feel like it's also a little disingenuous to deal with the people who are

Speaker 1 dealing with the ramifications of a system without thinking of the system itself.

Speaker 1 Like, like one of the biggest ones that throws me in my daily life is

Speaker 1 I'll think about like drunk driving.

Speaker 1 I always think it's confusing that if you sign a contract and you are inebriated, most courts would argue that you did not have the capacity to sign that contract.

Speaker 1 Let's say you were drunk at the time. So you couldn't agree.

Speaker 1 You were in an altered state.

Speaker 1 If somebody drives drunk and they crash their car into people, they are prosecuted fully because the law says they made a decision to drive drunk.

Speaker 1 But I'm like, yeah, but that same law in another instance says you did not have the capacity to make a decision.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I mean? And it's these small paradoxes that are complicated. And that's what law needs to get into.

Speaker 1 That's what I think law was fundamentally meant to be about is trying to understand the complicated nuances in a society, provide clarity as to how to deal with them on a case-by-case basis.

Speaker 1 But the messiness of the system isn't dealt with. Like whenever these college things came up,

Speaker 1 I would see them have all these conversations, but very seldom would I see colleges say,

Speaker 1 what do we think about how we allow alcohol on a campus? Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying that that is the cause, but I'm going, you cannot separate a conversation about sex and young people from alcohol, but you're just going to talk about the people and not the environment that the people are in and how they're consuming the alcohol and then what then happens.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 you're with me.

Speaker 1 And sometimes I think it's such a...

Speaker 1 It's such a short-sighted and small approach that you may end up swinging back and forth the whole time because you just go, oh yeah, you know, one administration goes, it's the guys who are the problem, then it's the girls who are the problem.

Speaker 1 Then it goes, it's just going to keep going back and forth. And the institutions never actually have to ask themselves, wait, what environments are we creating?

Speaker 1 To your point, in educating, in, they do those campus tours. They tell you about the morals of the campus.
This is what it's like to be a student here. This is where you should go for this.

Speaker 1 I feel like even on that level, colleges should say, hey, we're going to teach you about sex on campus. This is part of your onboarding.

Speaker 1 This is part, not sex also in life, but we're going to like, we're going to talk about sex in a college setting. We're going to talk to people about sex.
We're going to talk to you about shame.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk to you about pleasure. We're going to talk to you.
But these things are all part of sex itself.

Speaker 1 And if we don't, we're just going to be living in a world where everyone is coming in with like their own little manual that was written by porn or their friends or their parents or a random school teacher that taught them nothing.

Speaker 1 And then we wonder why there's so many breakdowns in that world. Do you get what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, I do think colleges do try to some extent.
Like I remember on my college campus, we did get

Speaker 2 a talk about how to handle sex, how to handle drinking. And the thing is, like, I still didn't really know that Title IX existed until my senior year.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 2 And so it's not something that I think can be solved by like one talk that the college campus gives to incoming freshmen, especially, I mean, when you're in a family.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, more than a talk. I mean, like, it's, it's, to me, it's a syllabus.
It's part of life. But, but carry on, sorry.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I mean, I think that it just,

Speaker 2 I don't know, I think, I'm thinking back to all these young women I interviewed. So in the course of doing these interviews, I never asked people if they had been sexually assaulted.

Speaker 2 Like that was not a standard question that I had because it didn't necessarily want to put people into a space if they weren't willing to talk about it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But I was staggered by the number of young women and some young men who told me that they had been sexually assaulted, that it just came up organically in the course of the conversation.

Speaker 2 And to me, I feel like we are just simply not at a place where we are dealing with this or thinking about this at the scale that it's occurring.

Speaker 2 I did ask young people, yo, can you tell me about a cultural or social or political event that shaped your approach to sex?

Speaker 2 And almost all of them said me too.

Speaker 2 Most of them had memories of it. Some of them didn't, which was very shocking to me because it made me feel very old.

Speaker 2 But like, it turns out that very little has really changed post-me too in terms of like actual legal reforms, actual changes on college campuses.

Speaker 2 Like the main change we saw post-me too was reforms in NDA laws, which are not very helpful for college students who are not working, and better HR trainings or more HR trainings, I should say, on sexuality.

Speaker 5 Yet again, they're also not at work.

Speaker 2 Right. And so it just...

Speaker 2 We really, I think, have a resistance to having any of these kinds of conversations about the system or about how the system can be improved or what the law should do or what even like we should talk about in terms of culture.

Speaker 2 Like, is the law always the best mechanism for dealing with the aftermath of the system?

Speaker 1 That's a great question, actually.

Speaker 2 Like, not everybody actually wants to go through the legal system.

Speaker 2 I can tell you, I was sexually assaulted in college. I never thought about going to the cops because it was me and him alone in a room.

Speaker 2 And, like, I knew that was my word against his, and it wasn't going to end well. And incarceration is also not necessarily the same thing as justice.

Speaker 2 And so, I felt like

Speaker 2 what became very clear to me is in talking to these young people is like there is just a resounding failure across the board to take sexual assault and sexual abuse and its aftermath seriously.

Speaker 2 And like maybe Title IX,

Speaker 2 we at least need to be talking about Title IX as more than a political football in this environment.

Speaker 2 It can't just be something that Democrats and Republicans use to wield against each other to prove that one, oh, you're attacking men, you're attacking women.

Speaker 2 It has to be something that we actually have real conversations about as a law or as like the beginning of a foundation for cultural change.

Speaker 2 It's a noble thought,

Speaker 1 but I can't, no, I can't, I can't.

Speaker 2 No, fair enough.

Speaker 1 I can't help but think to myself,

Speaker 1 is that a possibility

Speaker 1 like ever in our evolution as humans? Because you can go back and read, I mean, like ancient texts.

Speaker 1 And it's shocking to find like the Greeks and the whatever, like on a legal level talking about morality and what is and isn't permissible and what a pervert is. And, you know,

Speaker 1 it feels like it's always going to be politicized. It's always going to be political because, to what you said in the beginning of the conversation, there's a power attached to it.

Speaker 2 And it's also a very,

Speaker 1 a very,

Speaker 1 it's the perfect tool to define where morality lies in a society. You know, you think of like...

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, no, but like how we view sex and

Speaker 1 even beyond the laws around it itself, but the how we view it. You know, you know, you think of colonial writing,

Speaker 1 the savages, the way they have sex and the savage savage sex.

Speaker 1 It's such a powerful tool to define where the norm exists and where the other starts.

Speaker 1 And I actually wonder, because you do write quite a lot about this. I actually wonder how much you think we can learn from societies or peoples who have been pushed to the fringes of society.

Speaker 1 Because I often find that they do a lot of work in defining sex in a way that like mainstream doesn't. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like I remember in around the Me Too movement, I learned more from the BDSM communities that came up online.

Speaker 1 Everyone was like, but how would we know? And then BDSM people were like, oh, so this is what we do. This is because we have been choking.

Speaker 2 We have been whipping. We have been.

Speaker 1 And it was, I was ignorant to it.

Speaker 1 I couldn't believe that people who were in those communities had checklists and had very, you know, like... tender and interesting guidelines on how to go about this.

Speaker 1 And I, so I wonder what, like, what you learned about what we could learn by engaging with groups or communities who have generally been pushed out to the fringes?

Speaker 2 I mean, a lot. I think that a lot of these groups, I mean, BDSM is a great example.
And I'm paraphrasing somebody else who said this,

Speaker 2 a philosopher at Yale who's talked about BDSM needs hierarchy into an erotic resource through consent. Wow.

Speaker 2 And so you can use consent to take, you know, all of these different hierarchies in society and like work with them and make them a part of your sexual play and your pleasure.

Speaker 2 And the fact of the matter is, like, I don't think that we should necessarily be aiming at abolishing hierarchies or that, because I just don't think it's necessarily possible.

Speaker 2 But I do think that there are a lot of communities that have thought a lot about like, how do we take the world as it is and figure out a way to wring pleasure out of this?

Speaker 2 I was really inspired in doing these interviews by the number of young people I spoke with who were

Speaker 2 interested in activism around sex.

Speaker 2 I talked with a lot of young people who were fighting against sexual assault, who were fighting for abortion rights, against abortion rights, who were fighting for LGBTQ plus rights.

Speaker 2 And there was one young woman who I talk about in the book, Zoe, who actually, she had been sexually assaulted and she had also had her nudes leaked multiple times. And she

Speaker 2 it was it was devastating for her. It was profoundly difficult for her to pick herself up again after that.
But she got involved in pleasure. advocacy on campus and became really invested in sex ed.

Speaker 2 And she got to a point where, you know, she is interested in sending nudes to her now boyfriend. And so the answer isn't necessarily, you know, never send nudes again.
You've been hurt by it.

Speaker 2 It's to create a framework for yourself where you can say, okay, I recognize the risks. Like maybe my nudes will get leaked again.
Maybe this boyfriend who I love so much will betray me.

Speaker 2 But if I go into these situations knowing the risks, I will feel more empowered than I did in a previous. situation that I was in.

Speaker 2 And I found that those kinds of stories to be very inspiring because, you know, people do pick themselves up and go on after these circumstances.

Speaker 2 And they do think about new frameworks for themselves that make them feel comfortable as opposed to just rejecting the thing that had hurt them in the past.

Speaker 1 I don't want to probe into your past, so please

Speaker 1 feel free to not share. But I'd love to know what you would have thought justice would have looked like in your story, because you say you weren't comfortable in going to the police,

Speaker 1 but you wanted something to happen. But you said an interesting phrase after that.
You said, you don't necessarily think that incarceration would have been the right solution.

Speaker 1 So when you look back on that, and again, like I say, we can move on, but like, what do you think justice would have looked like for you?

Speaker 2 I think an apology would have actually done a lot. Yeah.
Like it actually, I wasn't, I wouldn't have really needed, frankly, that much. And I should say that I wasn't raped.

Speaker 2 I describe it in the book, but it basically became like he wanted a blowjob. I didn't want to give him one.
We had like a physical tussle. over it.

Speaker 2 And I ultimately was able to effectively push him out of my apartment. And so maybe if someone had had like a different kind of assault or was just a different person, they would have wanted more.

Speaker 2 But I I would have felt that if he had acknowledged what had happened as something that had hurt me and said, I'm sorry that I did that, that would have been enough for me.

Speaker 2 And, you know, this is something that gets talked about in the concept of restorative justice, which I bring up a little bit in the book, which is that you can have, if you have.

Speaker 2 conversations and create a safe space for conversations.

Speaker 2 I think people don't necessarily realize that like, you know, there's actually a wide variety of outcomes that some people would accept that are not just punitive, but we don't create the space for those kinds of outcomes.

Speaker 2 We don't create the possibility for envisioning a world where it's like, it's not necessarily the law that's going to solve all of this stuff for us.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in a world where the law has now become responsible for handling all of communities' conversations, like every aspect of a conversation that should be held in a community,

Speaker 1 everything becomes legal. Do you know what I mean? And that's like one of the things

Speaker 1 that you see. It's really big in America, but it's expanding to the rest of the world as well, where people have lost or misunderstand the value of, as you said, I'm sorry.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or the value of, do you acknowledge the thing that happened to me? The value of,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 because of the business side of it, you know, which you talk about all the time,

Speaker 1 there isn't really value in the other one. There's no, there's no money in the sorry side, but there's money in the legal side.
You know what I mean? There's money in the

Speaker 1 punitive side. You put the person away in jail.
There's money to be made somewhere, but there's no money in connecting human beings on a restorative, on a restorative path.

Speaker 1 So that's like a it's a it's a beautiful way to think of it. Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah,

Speaker 5 I think

Speaker 5 in the in the most softest side of it, which is the one extreme, which is an emotionally unavailable boyfriend for a woman,

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 5 again, the battleground is a female body. And on the extreme side of it, which is assault and rape, is still the female body.
And

Speaker 5 on the other end of it, there can only be one perpetrator because they come from one gender. So even the innocent parties feel like one step could get me in the wrong place.

Speaker 5 So I think young people are not having sex because they don't like the human connection. I think they're scared.
Women are scared for what might happen to them.

Speaker 5 Men are scared of what they might do because they don't know much.

Speaker 5 So I think you're right when you're saying it should be all-encompassing when it comes to sex education because I think it exposed how much is missing from those people that we look at and go, Those were the nuclear family who were conservative in how they behave.

Speaker 2 Yeah, who are they?

Speaker 5 Yes, because at some point we have to admit that that generation also raised well-balanced and well-rounded individuals.

Speaker 5 So now this freestyling that's going on has left kids to their devices quite sooner. Kids take themselves to school earlier, they do their own homework, they bring themselves back.

Speaker 5 So there's no conversation, there's no way, and also there's no

Speaker 5 for males, especially, I I can speak for myself. I'll see that with younger ones, there's no examples of what a good man is, of what a good protector is.

Speaker 5 You know, I've had these conversations in South Africa where during GB gender based violence month, I would say, I hate.

Speaker 1 That's how we're against it, by the way.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that one month.

Speaker 1 Just no, but we're against it, just so you know. Because you never know.

Speaker 5 The night on the 31st.

Speaker 1 But you can't just say the month, because you never know if you fall against, against.

Speaker 2 I assumed against.

Speaker 1 I'm just letting you know. I don't want you walking away being like, in South Africa,

Speaker 1 they celebrate gender-based violence for a month.

Speaker 5 We don't celebrate it. Against it.
We highlighted. Against.
Yes.

Speaker 5 And I said, these activists and these NGOs, I feel like there's someone behind them, obviously, because the assault side of it, like punitive side of it, is a big business.

Speaker 5 And when they say they want to take the drive to younger men at school, I'm like, no, you can't automatically assume that a young man is going to commit sexual assault against or gender-based violence against a woman.

Speaker 5 You're not giving them the benefit of a doubt. You're already accusing them before they've gotten their first kiss or their first crush.

Speaker 1 Fear, to your point, is something you talk about even on the, you talk about in the book In and Around like Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it is, it is something that has to be, again, we don't know any number conclusively, but I do appreciate how you talk about what fear does to us and how we, how we should like.

Speaker 1 counting all these things. You're in school, the fear is you have sex, you're going to die.
Yeah. Or you're going to have a 16 pound baby.
These are your options.

Speaker 1 And then you move on to another one, and then it's like your fear. If you're a virgin, you're a loser, you're gonna die, you know, it's fear.

Speaker 1 And then there's another type of fear: if I come forward, I'll be shamed, or I will be, you know, I won't be listened to, or this will, it'll be a kangaroo call.

Speaker 1 It becomes a fear, and then you come into another situation.

Speaker 1 If you, if I say no, it's a fear. If I, if I don't say yes, even as like guys, you know how many young men I've talked to who go, I don't think that as a man, I have the option to not want sex.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I want to be clear. Also, you know, one in 25 young, one in 25 men in the U.S.

Speaker 2 has been penetrated against their will, and one in nine has been made to penetrate somebody else against their will. Wow.

Speaker 1 But I'm saying that's them like even against their will. I wonder if that includes men who will say, and this is what I mean by the complicated nature of it.
They may go,

Speaker 1 not against my will, but I didn't know that I can say no.

Speaker 2 And I think it was... Because men are expected to always want sex.

Speaker 1 Forget it from like even kids' sides. You know how many couples are in therapy because a wife is going, he doesn't want to have sex.
And the man's like, Yeah, I don't always want to have sex.

Speaker 1 And she's like, I mean, that clearly there's something wrong with me.

Speaker 1 And then now you're living in a world where one half of the couple is going, there's something wrong with me because men always want sex. Why doesn't he always want sex?

Speaker 1 And the man's like, Men don't always want sex. That's not like a real thing.
But now I can't say this to you.

Speaker 2 Now do you or the man is thinking, men always want sex. Why don't I always want sex? What's wrong with me? That's exactly.
So when we talk about that fear,

Speaker 1 I think of you add another layer to it. People go, oh, Gen Z, why are they so afraid of? And then you go, yeah.

Speaker 2 Have you seen sex lately?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And also, like, look at Roe v.
Wade. If you've told somebody that the actions of your sex

Speaker 1 could lead to somebody being pregnant when you, they didn't want to be pregnant, you didn't want to be pregnant. And now that, that's your life.
That's your baby. You're moving forward.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, you're a criminal. I can see some people going, ah, then I don't even want to have sex then.

Speaker 1 And I'm assuming you saw this or you felt this.

Speaker 1 How much do you think that affected how Gen Z now sees sex in America?

Speaker 2 I think one of the theses of the book is that the changes in the landscape around sex have added so much anxiety and fear around sex that it is for young people easier to opt out.

Speaker 2 And I'm not saying that this is a conscious decision that they're making.

Speaker 2 But when it feels so fraught to be vulnerable with another person, to have sex with another person, you know, why do it when porn is out there?

Speaker 2 Actually, one of the sort of moments I decided to write the book was there was a young woman who messaged me right after Roe was overturned. I think it was the following day.

Speaker 2 And she told me that she was pregnant and she didn't want to be, but she lived in Arizona. And Arizona had a law in the books that was centuries old that banned virtually all abortions.

Speaker 2 And abortion providers were afraid to provide abortions because they thought that the law might be back in effect.

Speaker 2 And so she could not end her pregnancy in the state where she was living. She ultimately ended up ordering abortion pills online and ending her own pregnancy in a motel room with her ex-boyfriend.

Speaker 2 And, you know, that is safe to do. Medical experts widely agree.
You can order pills online and you can end your pregnancy in your first trimester.

Speaker 2 You can end the pregnancy in the first trimester of pregnancy safely. But what she told me and what really stuck with me was that she felt like she was being humiliated for having sex.

Speaker 2 That even though the abortion was something she wanted, she felt empowered in the in having it. She felt like that was a good decision for her.

Speaker 2 She felt like Republicans in particular were trying to punish her for having been a person that had sex.

Speaker 2 And I think that that is a feeling that a lot of young people are grappling with right now, which is that, oh, there is politics is making me a bad person for having sex, or the state of politics, I would say, right now, is making me a bad person for having sex.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, with Roe v.

Speaker 2 Wade gone and more than a dozen states having banned almost all abortions at this point, we're creating a generation that has to grapple with that fear every day and has to think about, okay, if I did get pregnant or if I do get somebody else pregnant, what are we going to do?

Speaker 2 Do I have the money to end this pregnancy? Could we go out of state?

Speaker 2 What does it mean if I just continue to have this baby?

Speaker 2 One in five men have been involved with somebody who went on to have an abortion. And so this is not just something that affects women.

Speaker 5 Knowingly or unknowingly?

Speaker 2 Both.

Speaker 2 And so this is not just an issue that just affects women. it is something that many of the young men I spoke to we're also thinking about and we're also wracked with anxiety over

Speaker 5 yeah I've seen how it also

Speaker 5 what's happening in the world affects how men date because sometimes disagreements with someone that you're dating are very tricky when you think what could happen when they leave here

Speaker 5 You know, I've seen people who are going, yeah, but, you know, might not agree about me not wanting to have sex with her or her wanting to do it with me.

Speaker 5 Not now, she's here, I must play along so that at least I'm safe. It's not a thing of when she can go out there and change her mind about what happened here.

Speaker 5 Because also, we've had people stories of people who become malicious and weaponize the fact that many women get raped and many women get sexually assaulted, and a slight disagreement in a relationship can turn to, you know,

Speaker 2 a few of those stories.

Speaker 1 It is actually sad how that happens.

Speaker 1 We've seen a few of those stories recently in the news, and

Speaker 1 it is interesting to use the airplane analogy.

Speaker 1 It's amazing how people can use a few stories

Speaker 1 to create so much fear. And

Speaker 1 do you know what I mean? It's like

Speaker 1 it's messy and it's complicated. And it's like,

Speaker 1 I wonder if you came to any

Speaker 1 light at the end of a tunnel. And not that this is a morbid thing, by the way, you know? Yeah.
But like, listen, like to what Eugene is saying now, I agree with completely.

Speaker 1 Do you know what I'm saying? think about like some of the conversations we've had on this podcast in different episodes

Speaker 1 you you know you you have a healthcare industry that does something that's pretty good for people with their kidneys dialysis and then there's a few companies who come in and go this is how we can use this to to make money and it hurts people in the same instance here you know some people can use the laws in their favor to hurt somebody

Speaker 1 they can hurt women can use a law to hurt men men have been using the law in in their favor to hurt women for decades and decades.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 where's like the, is there a hope in all of this? Or is it just us always grappling with the messiness that is never contained?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think grappling with the messiness can be something that is a hopeful process. Because I think the messiness of sex is what makes it interesting.

Speaker 2 is what makes it kind of fun. And I think that we shouldn't try to make sex something that is black or white or that is very strictly one thing or the other.

Speaker 2 Like I think we should try to look at sex in the landscape of its messiness and enjoy that.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the things that did give me hope was the extent to which young people were trying to do that.

Speaker 2 And I think because these young people have grown up seeing Roger overturned, seeing Me Too break out, dealing with a profoundly turbulent political environment, I think they understood a lot earlier than, say, I did that sex has political dimensions.

Speaker 2 And that no matter what we do, sex will always have those political dimensions and that political valence.

Speaker 2 And they said to themselves in many instances, okay, given that that is true, what can I do in my community to change those dimensions and make sex be something that is something that I don't have to be afraid of or that my friends don't have to be afraid of?

Speaker 2 And I think that as much as the political elements of sex can make people anxious, it can also be,

Speaker 2 it can also give them the feeling like, okay, I can create change. around sex.
It's not just something that happens in a bedroom between me and my partner or me and my partners.

Speaker 2 It's something that I can go out and try to redefine the terms of in school rooms or go out and try to redefine the terms of in school board meetings and in courtrooms and in state legislatures and in Congress.

Speaker 2 Like it is possible to change as opposed to thinking that sex is just this dirty thing that we can never ever seek to make better.

Speaker 5 100%. I think what's tricky about sex is it's both a want and a need at the same time.

Speaker 1 Oh, damn.

Speaker 5 So it makes people, you know, very confused about where to draw the line.

Speaker 2 So, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that it.

Speaker 1 I never thought of it like that.

Speaker 5 Did I see what I did there?

Speaker 2 You so these things happen often in this podcast.

Speaker 2 I'll take it to the top, top, top.

Speaker 5 Then we get stuck there.

Speaker 2 Then there's just a moment of silence, of reverence.

Speaker 2 There's a moment of silence. And in the pointedness of your.

Speaker 2 Just that was an incredible insight.

Speaker 1 I mean, more than that, what happens is I think to myself, we're so lucky that he would dare to be with us.

Speaker 1 This community service is just, I go, why?

Speaker 2 Again, your philanthropy.

Speaker 1 We just don't deserve it. I just, that's all I think to myself.
I'm like, man, I've got to go and talk to somebody who doesn't deserve it the way I don't deserve to listen to you.

Speaker 1 Carter,

Speaker 1 we really had fun. This was great.

Speaker 1 I think I appreciate more than anything how nuanced your book is. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 1 in a world where everything is turning into

Speaker 1 like one thing or another, it's so rare to read an account of just like human complexity, you know, age, gender,

Speaker 1 legal, parent, child, you name it. I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't be seen in this book.
And so, thank you, thank you for coming and chatting to us about it.

Speaker 1 And you know, I hope everyone reads it. And I can't wait to see what you write about in the next one.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. That's very kind of you to say.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much. This is dope.

Speaker 1 Too much fun

Speaker 5 thank you for all the sex funds you are so good you made this so much fun yeah man thank you very much for real of course it's good too geez that was fun

Speaker 1 this episode is presented by whole foods market whole foods market is the place to get everything you need for thanksgiving with great prices on turkey quality organic produce grab and go sides and everyday low prices from 365 brand you can prep for the holiday with big savings shop everything you need for thanksgiving now at whole foods Market.

Speaker 1 What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackle.
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