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Don’t forget, the Explore More Summit: Bodies Edition kicks off December 4th and it’s totally free. We’ll spend 5 days going super deep into body politics, self acceptance, fat activism, diet culture, weight stigma, and shedding body shame so we can center our pleasure.
To see the line-up and to enroll, pop over to exploremoresummit.com.
This week, Jaclyn Friedman is here to talk all about her new book, “Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All.” It is a powerful, comprehensive examination of all the ways our ideas about sex intersect with things like media, racism, justice, toxic masculinity, patriarchy. Basically, all my favorite topics wrapped up into one.
We geek out about why sexual olympics and hedonism will NOT set everyone free. What it means to have “fauxpowerment” around our sexuality and why individualistic solutions aren’t going to heal the world.
We talk about Hugh Hefner (ugh), the ways doctors fail us, Jaclyn’s visit to a sex research lab and what the vagina REALLY is. Seriously, that last bit blew my mind.
We also talk about what we can do to actually start changing the world, how we can confront things like toxic masculinity and patriarchy, and why it all matters.
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In this episode, Jaclyn and I talk about:
- How wide the net is cast in Jaclyn’s new book about the systemic issues around sexuality.
- The fauxpowerment myth that we are fed that we can just push ourselves to sexual empowerment, but we have to recognize the powerful institutions that are invested in our feelings of brokenness or a certain kind of sexuality.
- Finding actual sexual power and sexual liberation requires culture change. But that’s overwhelming, so no wonder we are eager for the classes and the products that offer a seemingly simple fix.
- Why capitalism and individualist solutions keep us all sexually broken.
- How hedonism became conflated with liberation. OH GOD FUCKING YES.
- Hugh Hefner and how fucked up his ideas were about women and sexuality. Ugh. Gross.
- Medical professionals grow up in the same culture that we do. Which means, doctors are swimming in sex negativity and patriarchy and sexism, too. Doctors famously disbelieve women about sexual pain and discomfort because men in our culture disbelieve and distrust women, period.
- Jaclyn talks about disaster-prevention sex ed which is sadly the better version of sex ed available in most U.S. public schools. Which is to say, it completely dismisses and ignores pleasure, especially for folks with vulvas and who are queer.
- Jaclyn had a chance to go to a sex research lab run by Meredith Chivers and shares some amazing stories, plus what the vagina ACTUALLY is. MIND. BLOWN.
- We trust guys when they tell us what’s going on with their bodies, so why don’t we trust women? Women can have the physical symptoms of arousal without actually feeling aroused. And yet….that’s not the story we are told to culturally accept.
- The psychological process of “backlash” and why often we double-down on incorrect or blatantly untrue information. Jaclyn shares a chilling study that is in her new book that showed that men who heard stories of sexual assault from the victims actually were MORE likely to then think sexual assault/rape was acceptable. WTF.
- Why restorative justice can be challenging on survivors and Jaclyn’s thoughts on how we haven’t yet found an answer that is perfect around violence and survivors.
- Toxic masculinity and the response that women inevitably receive whenever they post about it. #NotAllMen #StopHatingMen *eyeroll*
- Why gender and masculinity myths need to be dealt with using prevention and not intervention. We need to be teaching young people from very early ages about toxic masculinity and gender issues before their form their ideas of what it means to be a man.
- How can we start changing the culture? How can we have an impact? Jaclyn has phenomenal suggestions. We can center our pleasure in our activism and change work. YAY!
About Jaclyn Friedman:
Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, speaker and activist, and creator of the hit books Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009, and #11 on Ms. Magazine’s Top 100 Feminist Nonfiction of All Time list) and What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety. Her podcast, Unscrewed, is paving new paths to sexual liberation, and was named one of the Best Sex Podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire.
As an undergraduate, Jaclyn thought she was too smart to become a victim of sexual assault – until another student proved her wrong. That experience eventually led her to become a student and instructor of IMPACT safety training. At IMPACT, she helped bring safety skills to the communities which most need them, including gang-involved high school students and women transitioning out of abusive relationships.
Friedman’s work has popularized the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent that is quickly becoming law on many US campuses. Her insistence that authentic sexual liberation is a necessary condition to end the systemic sexualization and violation of women led Lyn Mikel Brown (Co-founder of SPARK and Professor of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Colby College) to call her “this generation’s version of Dr. Ruth.”
Stay in touch with Jaclyn on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Hey, you! Welcome to another episode of Sex Gets Real. This week I am talking with Jaclyn Friedman. She’s been on the show before. This time, we actually recorded it several weeks ago. But I was sitting on it because her brand new book “Unscrewed” is about to hit bookshelves. I had an advanced copy of it and had a chance to read it. It is so good. It brings together some of the most massive consuming topics and the ways that they intersect with sexuality, from politics and media to racism and body politics to indigenous law. I mean, it covers everything. I don’t know. I just think it’s going to be a pretty powerful addition to all of our bookshelves. The full title is “Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All.” It comes out on November 14, 2017.
Dawn Serra: We completely geek out. We talk about Hugh Hefner. We talk about how hedonism has become conflated with liberation, especially in sex positive circles and how we can’t sexual Olympics our way to liberation. We talk about capitalism and individual solutions and how they keep us feeling sexually broken and why the medical profession is failing us, and sex ed, and toxic masculinity. I mean, we talk about some big shit in this episode, and we have a blast doing it.
I also want to remind you that Explore More Summit is having a special breakout edition. It’s going to be December 4th through the 8th. And it’s entirely online and free. We’re going to spend five days talking all about body politics, self-acceptance, fatphobia, fat acceptance, and diet culture. If you’ve ever been on a diet, if you’ve ever felt like you had to change your body, if you’ve ever felt like your body wasn’t good enough and you weren’t worthy, this is absolutely for you. We have some big conversations, some really confronting conversations, and we’re going to do it all together with the Explore More community. So go to exploremoresummit.com to sign up. I would love to see you there. It’s going to be so rad.
Dawn Serra: Let me tell you a little bit about Jaclyn, and then we will jump into this very rich hour. Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, speaker, and activist and creator of the hit books, “Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape” and “What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety.” Her podcast, “Unscrewed,” is creating new paths to sexual liberation and was actually named one of the best sex podcasts by both Marie Claire and Esquire. Here is my rich, delicious chat with Jaclyn about her new book, “Unscrewed.”
Welcome back to the show. Jaclyn. I am ridiculously excited to talk to you.
Jaclyn Friedman: Oh, me too! Thanks for having me back.
Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. Any chance that I get to geek out with someone as smart and amazing as you just feeds my soul. I just finished reading my advanced copy of your new book, “Unscrewed.” It was like having brain sex with you from afar.
Jaclyn Friedman: Ooh. Flattery will get you everywhere, Dawn.
Dawn Serra: Perfect. OK. I think one of the things that just felt so delicious to me about the book is, well, you cover so many enormous topics in this book. I mean, you talk about legislation. You talk about sex education. You talk about sex work. You talk about black women and reproductive justice. You talk about indigenous rights and the ways that they used to handle rape pre-colonialism. I mean, there’s just all this juicy stuff that you’re railing against, and highlighting and bringing to light toxic masculinity. It just made my heart so happy because one of the things that impressed me so much about this was there’s this danger, I think, in sexuality to be so focused on just sex and just pleasure or just consent – which are all important things. But you’re casting your net so wide to allow us to see that pretty much all of the things we’re all suffering from are systemic issues. They’re not like personal failures, which is where I think so many people come to these issues.
Jaclyn Friedman: Everyone seems to think that whatever issues they’re having with sex is on them to fix. I think women, especially – but not exclusively – and queer and gender queer people, people for whom the sexual culture is not intentionally created, like the larger sexual culture. In the book, I call this the “fauxpowerment” myth, which is the idea that we can just sort of, “You go, girl,” ourselves to sexual freedom, when in fact, there are profoundly deeply rooted and powerful institutions that have a lot to do with how sexually free we feel and how we experience or don’t experience our bodies and our pleasure. The book, the project of the book is really is to expose all of that. And it’s huge, right? It’s huge.
Dawn Serra: It’s huge!
Jaclyn Friedman: I think about talking about sexuality on three levels. There’s the doing it level, like the mechanics and like, “Give me advice about how to do a better blow job,” or those sorts of things. Then there’s sexual ethics, like “How do we treat each other as sex partners, and how do we navigate our sexual relationships?” Then this book is on the third level, which is the context in which we’re doing all of that stuff.
I feel like most sexuality conversations happen either on the first or second level. Both of those levels are really important. I’m not saying we should all be on the third level. We have to meet people where they are and people live on a really individual place. I feel like this meta conversation gets left out, and it has just so much impact on the way we experience our sex lives.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. One of the things that I loved about your “fauxpowerment” piece was I think there’s a lot of people in the world doing a lot of work to point out things around market feminism, and the ways that the body positivity movement has been co-opted by companies like Dove, who are actually just trying to sell you on creams and lotions to make you prettier. We’re seeing this in so many different areas of activism where corporations then come in and try and sell us on this brand of empowerment that’s not actually about real power. It’s about the illusion of if we do these things, then we’ll be personally more powerful but not kind of culturally free. I thought the ways that you talked about “fauxpowerment” and the examples that you gave, and really talking about how we can’t claim to be sexually liberated and sexually free when women, specifically, or trans or queer folks – but we’ll talk about women for most of this – but when women actually say, “Here’s what I want, and here’s what I’m going to do,” and then they get punished for it, there’s actually no power in that.
Jaclyn Friedman: There’s no power in it. I get why the “fauxpowerment” narrative is so appealing because the other answer, the way to real power is, we have to do the work of cultural change. And that’s overwhelming. Most people don’t even know where to start with that. Even those of us who do, it’s overwhelming. So when you’ve got someone saying, “You don’t have to worry about changing the culture. Just take this class or buy this product or watch this movie or whatever it is, and you’ll be empowered,” it’s very appealing. I fall for it, too.
What’s not to say that there aren’t things that we can buy that makes us feel better sexually. Whether that’s sex toys that we love or media that have a message that really resonate with us or pole dancing classes or whatever, on an individual level, there are things we can spend our money on that may make us feel more sexually powerful in the short term.
Jaclyn Friedman: But there’s two problems with it. One is, most folks who are selling individual empowerment solutions are not really wanting you to get free. Because if you did, you wouldn’t need to buy their next thing.
Dawn Serra: Exactly. That’s why Weight Watchers doesn’t actually really want you to lose that weight.
Jaclyn Friedman: Exactly. They want you to keep being a consumer. So those original Dove Real Women ads were to sell anti-cellulite cream, which I had not remembered until I went back to do the work, and I was like, “Oh my, god. That’s horrifying.” Now, what’s Dove doing? They’ve decided that it’s really important for you to be able to raise your hand and be powerful. But you can only do that if your armpit is less gnarly than it is now. So we’re going to sell moisturizing deodorant. They’ve invented a problem you didn’t even have before and are telling you that once you solve it, you’ll feel powerful. That’s one. The incentives of getting free via the market are just fucked up. I can swear on your podcast, right?
Dawn Serra: Oh, please.
Jaclyn Friedman: OK. They’re just fucked up. Capitalism does not want you to get free, just period.
The second is, any liberation solution that requires you to shell out money for it isn’t going to get everybody free because not everybody… Economic equality is not a reality. I mean, on any level, even just on the level of women making cents on the male dollar. It’s an individualistic solution. It’s not changing anything. It’s not helping anybody but you, and mostly it’s helping you temporarily.
Again, there is nothing wrong with wanting some temporary relief from the oppressive society we live in. I buy some of this stuff, too. But I think we need to be clear and honest with ourselves about what buying stuff to make us feel better is for and what it isn’t going to accomplish.
Dawn Serra: One of the things that you pointed out that I loved was when we think about the money that’s being made, and we compare white women’s cents to the dollar, and then Black women’s cents to the male dollar, and then Latinx women’s cents to the male dollar, it goes down. It’s like 86 cents, and then 73 cents, and 53 cents or something like that. Yet, we, by and large, are the ones that are marketed to, to then be spending our money on things that aren’t actually helping our larger situation.
When we go and spend that money for the prettier underarms and for those super expensive makeup and for the weight loss, all of that money is not money that is then helping us to have more equality from our financial standpoint or giving us better access to health care. It’s literally just keeping us trapped in this cycle, where we have less money, and then we’re spending it on things that we’re told are important, but aren’t actually helping us to know more about our bodies or to help us be able to advocate for ourselves in a more safe environment. It’s not helping to overturn toxic masculinity. In fact, a lot of capitalism is actually reinforcing toxic masculinity and violence. It’s just this nasty side.
Jaclyn Friedman: It is a nasty cycle, yeah. Unfortunately, I should tell people up front, I do not have a solution for capitalism in the book. But what I do recommend, and as you know because you read it, each of the chapters takes a look at a different institution or cultural force that is in the way of us having full equal sexual sovereignty. I didn’t want to write a book that was just all like, “Here’s a litany of everything that’s fucked up in the culture.” Who wants to read that goddamn book? I didn’t want to write it.
Dawn Serra: ‘Cause it’s a lot.
Jaclyn Friedman: Go home. Everyone cry.
Dawn Serra: Right.
Jaclyn Friedman: Each chapter also features a person or group, who I think is doing great work to move the ball down the field, in a positive direction, in the area that that chapter is about. In the chapter about economics, the one that you’re talking about right now, I focused on this amazing day shelter for homeless or housing unstable youth, specifically queer youth, which is called Youth on Fire. It’s here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It really is a way of seeing past neoliberalism. I know that’s like a weird buzzword. Honestly, people use it to mean like, “Person I don’t like at this point.”
But what neoliberalism actually is, what it literally means is it’s a belief that the market will do the right thing if you let it. That the market knows what’s good and what’s bad. That the market is a moral force basically, and we just need to get out of its way, which is profound bullshit. Especially when you think about these kids who the market thinks are worthless. They literally have nothing. This space that teaches them to value themselves and by valuing them, it’s such a profound restructuring. I propose not just that we feel good that they’re getting this kind of help, but that we learn from them. That we learn that all of us can just start to see that neoliberal mindset in our lives and reject it. That we don’t have to define our own worth or each other’s worth based on what we can buy or what we can’t buy.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. OK. There’s a billion things that–
Jaclyn Friedman: There’s a lot in this book.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, that totally just made me want to put my cheerleader outfit on and do fat girl cartwheels down the hallway. But one of the things that I loved so much was, I’ve been talking about this more and more recently in a clunky way as I’ve been finding language for it. You had this quote in the book – I think it was in chapter one actually, talking with Loretta Ross – that was just like, “That’s it!” Where, I know that so many people in the sex education world, in the sex positive world are genuinely coming from a place of, “We shouldn’t have sexual shame, and we need to undo sex negativity.” But then the pendulum is swung too far in the opposite direction where we’ve gotten to a place where a lot of people are just insisting that the solution is for everyone to find their g-spot and have orgasms. That all women should be just as sexually open as possible. And it is kind of prescriptive still.
You have this line that “Hedonism became conflated with liberation.” I think that’s such a powerful line where, instead of actually listening to the vast array of voices that are suffering and who aren’t being listened to, it’s become this, “Well, the key to all of us feeling better is to just have lots of hedonistic experiences and sex. If you’re having more orgasms, then you’re liberated. You’re good.”
Jaclyn Friedman: I find that argument so exhausting. You can’t sexual Olympics your way to freedom. Some people have really adventurous sexual tastes and drives. And that’s great. Good for you. Some people don’t. Most people have a mix – some of their tastes might be perceived as adventurous, and some of them might not.
Real sexual liberation is when we get to know ourselves and value our sexual relationship with ourselves and our own sexual sovereignty, and pursue the sex lives, whatever they look like, that work for us. That we’re not out trying to prove how free we are. This was a head trip that came out of the 60s sexual revolution, where it became less taboo for a bunch of reasons, which we probably don’t have time for this podcast. It became less taboo for women specifically to have premarital sex. Great, fantastic – smashed taboos. But it wasn’t like women instantly had more social power compared to men, nor did women just instantly have the tools to negotiate for ourselves and to stand up for our needs and desires and boundaries.
Jaclyn Friedman: What happened in practice was, men used the fact of the sexual revolution to pressure women into sex. They would be like, “Well, what are you hung up if you’re not going to have sex with me?” Not just like, “Maybe I don’t want to have sex with you because I don’t want to.” Women’s agency did not get freed in the sexual revolution. Unless comforted to this really male idea of what they wanted women to be like.
That is so embodied in all the interviews you can read about what Hugh Hefner was thinking and saying back in the day. There’s this crazy quote in there about… He gave this interview about how the sexual revolution is freeing women to be their natural sexual selves or something like that. He defines that in this very particular way about girls, young women being simple and sweet. I’m not using the right words. I should have the book right in front of me, but I don’t. He says, “We’re not talking about sophisticated women with elegant underwear.” That’s the part that makes you fall every time. I’m like, “Elegant underwear disqualifies women? Like what?”
Jaclyn Friedman: AndI what does that mean? It just means men would rather fuck women who they can push around. He’s literally saying what I defined as natural for women as a woman who’s docile and who is maybe uneducated, naive, doesn’t have her own agenda, and therefore conserve mine. He doesn’t say it that way. He makes it sound like it’s just biology. But if you look through history, in medieval times, women were feared and revered for their fecundity and their voracious, out of control sexual appetites. That’s where we get the idea of the vagina dentata from. What the culture imagines is natural for women’s sexuality changes wildly depending on that culture. It’s constructed.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yes. All right. There’s so much. I mean, one, that Hugh Hefner quote of that idealizing the girl next door, and not wanting someone who’s sophisticated, who also has some experiences and some feelings–
Jaclyn Friedman: And maybe some standards, right?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly.
Jaclyn Friedman: She maybe can be like, “Ah. You’re not as good as my last guy.” Right?
Dawn Serra: Right.
Jaclyn Friedman: Which is super rich because Playboy is and was pitched, but even more so back then, pitched that sophisticated man. But a woman who had the same characteristics as the men they’re trying to reach, they don’t want it all. They completely reject.
Dawn Serra: Right. Because it takes us into that virgin whore dichotomy and that innocence versus the sexually explicit whore, which is pervasive and everything that we’re still dealing with. I mean, especially when we start looking at it across race lines and the ways that we sexualize and slut shame black and brown girls. Also, this temptation to want to disbelieve women.
I think that that touches on this whole innocence thing that Hugh Hefner is talking about of like, “If she’s innocent and sweet and naive, then she won’t really have any ideas about the world, so I can tell her what to believe and what to think about sex.” Then that ties into this cultural pressure we have of where we’re always telling people how to behave, how to feel about sex, how to experience their bodies. Then we end up in a place where the vast majority of the emails that I get are, “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what feels good. I don’t know how to ask for what I need. Or, when my boyfriend asks me what I want, I have absolutely no idea what to tell him.” Because we have no tools or skills for actually looking within and saying like, “Hey! What’s going on in me?” We’re just surrounded and immersed in a culture that’s insisting that they know better than we do.
Jaclyn Friedman: Absolutely. I wrote my last book, “What You Really Really Want,” because of that exact thing. Because when I was touring around, talking about affirmative consent when “Yes Means Yes!” came out, I heard from so many young women – and older women also – who would say to me, “I love the idea of Yes Means Yes! I love the idea that partners should pay attention to what you’re actively into, and not just what you’re not objecting to. But how do I know what I want to say yes and no to? How do I even figure that out?”
So I literally wrote a whole book because I was like, “Well, I’ve figured out some things about that along the way. But you’re right. There’s no framework for that. We don’t give women, especially, any framework for that.” In fact, in the public schools, we mostly teach that sex is terrifying – “You shouldn’t do it. If you do do it, you’re wrong.” Or at best, we’re teaching what we colloquially call disaster prevention sex ed, which is, “Don’t do it. But if you insist on doing it, here’s how to prevent disease spread and pregnancy.” And most of that focuses on penis and vagina.
Jaclyn Friedman: What that results in is we never teach women, girls, queer students, anyone that the sexual culture is not set up for, that sex could be good for them. When you make the pleasure a taboo in sex ed, which it completely is in the US… Cis guys get that elsewhere. It’s in the media. You get the message that you’re supposed to enjoy your sex life. Although, they also get a lot of pressure to have quantity over quality.
Dawn Serra: And constantly raging hard cock.
Jaclyn Friedman: Constantly, yeah. I’m not saying guys don’t also get boxed in and failed by sex ed. But they, at least, get the basic message that it’s supposed to feel good and be fun. But girls don’t get that. When I was growing up, and this is still true today in a lot of schools, the clitoris wasn’t on any of the diagrams when we did sex ed and reproductive health and all of that. There’s no clitoris because you don’t have to talk about the clitoris in order to scare people out of sex. Because the clitoris’s only purpose is for female pleasure. When you leave that out–
That’s my shorthand. I always ask young women if I’m talking with them around sexual liberation stuff, I ask them, “Did you learn about the clitoris in school?” So few of them have, even now. And that’s shorthand for me for like, “Did you get sex ed that even acknowledges that sex should feel good for women?” When we don’t teach that, and then when women are treated poorly by sex partners, when it does feel terrifying or painful, we haven’t taught girls and women that that’s wrong. We fail to teach them to expect something else. It’s profound malpractice.
Dawn Serra: Well, I think what even makes that more terrible and harmful is that when women and girls do experience painful sex, often they’re disbelieved by doctors, by medical professionals, by partners. So it’s been this gaslighting by the people who should be helping you.
Jaclyn Friedman: It’s such a cycle. There’s a whole chapter that was one of the last chapters to come together in the outline about all of the professionals who affect our sex lives in ways we don’t think about, and medical professionals are on the top of that list. Lawyers and judges and journalists and all kinds of folks – cops. But medical professionals have such a profound impact on our lives. So often, they grew up in the same sexual culture that we’re talking about. And it’s a male dominated profession.
You’re right that women who go to the doctor with symptoms of vulvodynia, it takes them, on average, a year to get diagnosed. I think one of the big reasons is because doctors regularly underestimate women’s pain. If a woman comes in and says, “I’m experiencing pain,” doctors expect that women are exaggerating about pain. Because women are just not seen as reliable about their own bodies. I saw this also in talking to the sex researchers that I profile in chapter two.
Dawn Serra: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Jaclyn Friedman: The most fun thing I got to do for the book was I got to go to Meredith Chivers’ sex lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I got to attach sensors to my clit and put it inside my vagina and watch porn. It was work.
Dawn Serra: That sounds amazing.
Jaclyn Friedman: That’s my job, OK?
Dawn Serra: Yup, yup. It was for science.
Jaclyn Friedman: It was for science, OK?
Dawn Serra: Right.
Jaclyn Friedman: But her research is so interesting. Both the research itself, which is about sexual concordance, which is the gap between the way our bodies physically respond to sexual stimuli and the way that we experience, whether we’re turned on or not or how much. But also the way that research is misinterpreted. Almost willfully misinterpreted.
What she found in general and gets into much more detail than we’re going to get into here. But the general top line that she found is that women overall have a much wider concordance gap than men do. That men, when exposed to a wide range of sexual stimuli, when they report how much they’re turned on, it tends to match fairly closely what their body is doing. And it also tends to match their reported sexual orientation. Those are broad generalizations, but those are the tendencies.
Jaclyn Friedman: Women respond physically to a wide range of stimuli, regardless of what they report about their sexual orientation. But they report a much narrower, subjective experience, lived response. There are a lot of theories about this that are super interesting. I can talk about it if you want because I actually do think they’re super interesting.
The point I’m trying to make here is, whenever her work gets reported on, it’s like, “Women are lying, and they’re all turned on, but they’re just not telling you. No women are straight. Everybody is secretly bisexual. The narrative that gets told about this research over and over is, “The body is telling the truth. The woman is wrong.” When in fact, why is the body the ultimate truth? Why is the woman’s experience not the most important part?
Jaclyn Friedman: And it’s because, I think, men – and you know, hashtag not all men – but men, as a category, want to believe that there’s this knowable answer to what women want sexually. Women can be treated as these interchangeable sex vending machines, and if you figure out the right inputs to put in, you get the output you’re looking for. It means you don’t have to interact with individual women as three dimensional humans,which is in fact what you need to do. If you want to know what a woman wants from sex, you have to talk to her. You really do.
Dawn Serra: Yes. I love that so much. You were like, “If someone’s asking what do women want, it’s not even a valid question.”
Jaclyn Friedman: You’re always going to get a wrong answer to that question because it’s a wrong question.
Dawn Serra: Yep, yeah. You have this wonderful quote in the book that’s on this very thing. It just makes me think like, if I’m standing outside with a whole bunch of friends, and there’s a breeze that comes through that makes some of my friends cold, but I don’t feel cold and I’ve got goosebumps, someone might be like, “Oh, you’ve got goosebumps. Are you cold?” If I say, “No, I actually have goosebumps because I’m really nervous,” they’re probably going to believe me. But if I say, “Oh, I’m getting wet, but I’m in no way turned on,” immediately, that changes the story that gets told. There’s this questioning of, “Are you sure?” You have this quote of, “If we believe men when they say, ‘No. I’m not really turned on right now. I just have to pee,’” then why do we treat women whose bodies and experiences aren’t aligned like suspect secret bisexuals?
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah, no. I’ve absolutely had male cis gender partners who have had morning wood, and in general told me, “It’s not so much that I want to have sex. It’s that I need to get up and whizz.” Some guys when they have morning wood, do you want to have sex? But I’ve had partners with that, and I never once said, “I don’t know Your body saying something different.”
Dawn Serra: Yup. You must be lying. OK. Something else that came out of your Meredith Chivers section that I loved so much, was when she said, “Vagina is just a space.”
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. Oh, my god. It changed my life.
Dawn Serra: I know. I love that so much. You were like, “My mind is blown. I’m now realizing that the vagina is actually the absence of stuff.”
Jaclyn Friedman: Right. The vagina… I mean, vaginal walls are a physical thing. But the vagina is just as it is an absence.
Dawn Serra: Isn’t it amazing to think about? Of all the things in the universe that have mentioned and talked about vaginas, when you really actually think about the anatomy of it, we’re talking about just a space. It’s not an organ. It’s not a thing. It’s just surrounded by stuff.
Jaclyn Friedman: Right. We could be talking about all that stuff. Also, this is the larger point she was making when she said that the analog to the penis is not the vagina. From a biological perspective, from a physical structural perspective, the analog to the penis is the clitoris. Those are analogous organs. In fact, all of us, when we’re in utero, have bodies that are going to develop clitorises and vulva and what gets identified as female genitalia, unless we get hit with this wash of hormones and we’re not protected by the XX chromosome pair. Not only is the vagina not the analog to the penis – the clitoris is – but also, the default human condition without intervention is female, not male.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Which I love. But I also think makes a lot of people go, “No.” They reject that.
Jaclyn Friedman: I just feel like, if I’m not making people uncomfortable, then I’m not doing my job.
Dawn Serra: I totally agree. Because it’s like there’s so much shitty reporting happening on science. Then on top of that, so much shitty science that happens that is constantly trying to prove the current cultural conditions. To prove there’s only two sexes. There’s only two genders. That men are more naturally gifted to science and math. Yet, when we actually have these really powerful studies happening. that show there’s so much diversity and sex chromosomes and so much diversity scientifically of gender, and that all of us start out with headed down the road to get a vulva and a clitoris, and then this wash of hormones maybe, you’re like, “I guess they’ll sprout a penis,” or some version of.
I think it’s fascinating that, culturally, we are so resistant to new ideas. You actually talked about this a little bit in the book too – some studies that have shown this – but how often when we’re deeply deeply invested in the existing stories and beliefs that we’ve surrounded ourselves with just to survive. Maybe we’re talking about someone who’s deeply invested in toxic masculinity because it felt like the only way they could survive. When you’re confronted with new information, when you’re confronted with new ideas and new stories and new truths, often instead of opening to those, you double down and dig even deeper into your existing beliefs, even if they’ve been proven fundamentally false.
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. And that’s a subconscious process. It’s not like people being jerks and being, “I’m going to double down.” It takes active, profound intentionality to subvert that process. The conscious process is, “I’m not going to double down. I’m going to decide to sit in this discomfort and take this in, and fight my impulse to double down.” It’s a psychological process called backlash.
The most chilling example of this that’s in the book that haunts me is, these researchers were studying an anti-rape program and what’s effective in getting men to be less rape-sipportive, more empathetic around sexual violence. They exposed three groups of men. One of them heard from a female survivor – they heard her story. One of them heard from a male survivor – they heard his story. One of them, I think, just got facts and information and didn’t hear anybody’s story. They were the control group.
Jaclyn Friedman: What they found was not only did none of those groups become more sympathetic or less likely to be rapists basically or do things they considered rape-supportive, like the idea that if a woman’s inebriated, you can do whatever you want to her or those sorts of things, those beliefs. Not only did they not shift in the right direction, but the group of men that heard from the female survivor, when they did the follow up test a few weeks later, expressed more rape-supportive beliefs and ideas than they had before they heard from her.
I just think about all of the anti-rape work that’s being done with no testing. You can be as well meaning as hell, but these things are pretty deeply entrenched, and we need to rely on good reliable science. Which also means we need to have funding for good, reliable science in order to actually know what works. There are programs out there that do actually reduce the risk of rape in a community. But a lot of them don’t. Some of them can literally backfire. Yet, we just don’t invest in the question. We don’t invest as a culture in the science it would take to really figure out how to do the work effectively. Instead, institutions that do this work, which is usually schools, they just pat themselves on the back for doing something. They’re like, “We did the thing,” and they’re not concerning themselves with whether or not it’s effective, whether or not they’re making anyone safer. Or, in this case, less safe. We’re not asking the right questions.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. There was this law that came up in a section of the book talking about indigenous sexuality and indigenous rights and laws. First, I just want to say, I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but I found it fascinating that throughout the book, you consistently pointed out the ways that black communities, black girls, black women, Latin women, indigenous communities are suffering without talking about racism. You don’t name racism over and over again. But you’re consistently showing the ways that these marginalized communities and identities are suffering the most. I found that fascinating. It was such an interesting way to draw people in without using words, I think, that would make someone go, “Ugh, I don’t want to talk about that.”
But in the section about indigenous rights, there was this piece where they were talking about, way early in colonialism, when the American government was trying to – I don’t know – do whatever they were doing terribly to indigenous folks. But they forced these Muskogee leaders to write down their rape laws. The law literally said that if any person should force a woman, that it’s left to the woman that was forced or raped what the punishment should be to whip or to pay, and whatever she says is the law.
Jaclyn Friedman: I know.
Dawn Serra: Isn’t that amazing?
Jaclyn Friedman: It gives me shivers thinking about it. Obviously, that law didn’t acknowledge that it’s possible to rape someone who’s not a woman, which of course it is. I also don’t know that I would sanction, even if a survivor wants it, whipping as a punishment for rape. From a modern perspective, we can talk about those things. But the core of that construction, which so centers the survivor, so profoundly centers the survivor, I just thought was transformative. Can you imagine if our legal systems so centered survivors? Like if someone was found responsible for sexual violence, the survivor gets to say what they want to happen. Obviously, I’d want that there to be some limits on that or something.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. But, to me, that also speaks, not only is the victim or the survivor being centered, but the survivor understands fundamentally that the community is there to help support them in whatever they choose, and to help this get carried out. I think that also helps with, “I get to really think about what justice would feel like, and I have the support of my community, knowing that they’re going to help me to heal and to move forward because they believe me.”
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. Now, look. With modern restorative justice conversations around sexual violence, I think that there are some pitfalls here. Specifically, that survivors can wind up under a lot of community pressure to be forgiving. I don’t think that I have happened upon a perfect system in which rapists are held to justice in a non-exploitative way. I think that restorative justice is very useful and has a lot to teach us, but also isn’t perfect. And I think it gets romanticized. It also requires– The modern ways we think about restorative justice require the survivor to do a lot of emotional labor, that they may or may not actually want to do. I always want to be critical, but just the mind shift of what’s possible, I found so helpful.
There’s another story from Sarah Deer’s book that you’re talking about – “The Beginning and End of Rape” – in the book. I think it was the Ojibwe tribe, although I don’t remember for sure, where it was tradition, if someone was raped, to revere them as wise and as a warrior. That also was such a profound shift for me when I read that because I do a lot of work around trying to remove stig ma from being a sexual assault survivor. That we shouldn’t shame victims, which seems–
Dawn Serra: It seems so silly, we have to say it.
Jaclyn Friedman: Paltry in the face of that. It just made me feel like, “Oh, destigmatizing is playing small ball.” We can be reaching so much higher than just, “Don’t shame people who’ve had violence done to them.” We could say, obviously, it does take a great strength to get through an experience like that. You probably learn a lot of things, whether you wanted to or not, from that experience. And to revere that experience and to say, “Well, this is one of our elders now.” Basically, you have elevated status. That also is profound. That idea itself is very healing to me.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Jaclyn Friedman: Especially because, in the anti-rape field, anyone who’s a survivor who’s doing anti-rape work on a professional level will tell you – and I’m no exception – that most media outlets want you to either be a victim or an expert. They either want you to tell your sad story or they want you to weigh in as an expert. But they cannot handle you being both. It was one of my pet peeves. That the idea that a victim of sexual assault can’t also be an expert. Now, I don’t think every victim of sexual assault is an expert. Expertise is a real thing. But I mean, they’re everyone’s an expert in their own story and their own experience, but you know, the social dynamics and all of that. But that our culture has literally the exact opposite of that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Literally, my brain goes a million directions. I recently got into this interesting discussion when I made a post about toxic masculinity. I’m sure you know what happens when you make a post about toxic masculinity–
Jaclyn Friedman: That was your first mistake.
Dawn Serra: On social media. But, yeah. Of course, the strong reaction of, “This is manhating,” and trying to, of course, do the labor of, “Let’s talk about the difference between masculinity and toxic masculinity.” Let’s talk about the ways that our culture forces gender performances to be in these tiny little boxes that are so unforgiving and so violent if you try to break out of them, and just like the natural state of simply being who you are. You had some wonderful stuff to say about toxic masculinity from the… Was it Boys to Men, group in Maine. Yeah, that’s helping young boys to really question toxic masculinity and actually to find ways to be empathetic and to celebrate being who they are. I would just love to know, for people who are listening, if they haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about toxic masculinity, what do you just really wish more people knew or what to think about or would investigate when it comes to our culture of masculinity?
Jaclyn Friedman: I mean, the thing for me, the nugget of it is, men aren’t masculinity. This is not the same category. Women can also have beliefs and toxic masculinity, and try to enact toxic masculinity and do, and call each other pussy and those sorts of things. It’s not about individual men. It’s about how we conceive of what makes a man manly. Those categories again, one of the best things you can do is look in history and see what historically has been considered manly. And it’s a wide variety of things, including the color pink, for example, was once considered a very masculine color, and was given to boys and not girls. That’s just one of them. It’s very changeable and culturally constructed. So when we’re talking about toxic masculinity, we are not saying men are toxic. We’re saying this culturally dominant idea of what it means to be a man is toxic.
But also, I think the thing I’d like to point out is, it’s also incredibly fragile that on an individual level, men need to have man-branded tissues in order to feel OK about blowing their nose a lot of the time. Man-branded loofahs in the shape of hand-grenades or whatever they are. Because God forbid, you should want to wash yourself in the shower.
Dawn Serra: Right. With a booth poof
Jaclyn Friedman: Right. If the state of manliness that those products are meant to uphold were so natural, we wouldn’t need those products to uphold it. If men being dominant and powerful over women and all of that stuff that’s wrapped up in toxic masculinity were truly inherent to men, masculinity wouldn’t be so fucking fragile. It just wouldn’t. So then we look at, “Well, why is this the dominant idea of masculinity that we’re living in right now? And how can it be different?” Once you can see, “Oh, hey. This isn’t natural. This is something we’re all collaborating to either uphold or or tear down,” I think it becomes a lot easier to depersonalize it and say, “Oh, right. We’re not talking about men. We’re talking about this really specific box we try to shove men in.”
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I have gotten into the habit of asking men who are talking about their frustration around not being able to find a woman, and how women constantly reject them, and how lonely they are, is to ask, “Well, where are the men in your lives that offer you touch and then offer you affection and then offer you safe spaces to talk about your feelings?” The answer is resoundingly always, “Well, I don’t.”
Jaclyn Friedman: “No homo.”
Dawn Serra: I have women friends that will do that for me or XYZ. But it just, for me, is another way of highlighting the fragility of this masculinity around, when you decide that over 50% of the population – because it’s not just other men, but it’s also probably trans folks and queer folks – but when you decide that 50% of the population cannot be who you turn to for support, because if you did, then everything would crumble – your masculinity would come into question, your sexuality might come into question. And that’s just too scary. That’s huge. This kind of requiring of labor from women to meet 100% of their needs, which I think is also why so many men need…
I think that’s why so many men are so hungry for sexual connection and sexual touch because it’s the only place that they can be touched and be seen and be held. That puts such a burden on the people that they’re engaging in sexual relationships with. Because culturally, we don’t leave safe spaces for men to have feelings to touch each other, to hold hands, at least in Western culture. I know that in many other cultures around the world, touch between men is very welcome. But at least here in Western culture, that is very frowned on.
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. Then we have the toxic masculinist in chief in charge here in the US. We literally elected an avatar of toxic masculinity, so it’s hard to see your way clear of that. Again, I have a lot of empathy for individual men who are trying to get clear. The answer isn’t just empower yourself. It’s not simpler for men either, just because they have relative cultural power over women. There are a lot of systems, and we have to dismantle them. That’s why I like the work of Maine Boys to Men because what they’re doing is– There are a number of programs around the US – and I’m sure elsewhere – who are working with high school or college men around rethinking masculinity and what it means to be a man. And they do great work. But I think of that as intervention. They’ve already formed their ideas about masculinity, and now we’re going to help you reform them. I really think the answer to this problem is figuring out how to do prevention. So that the toxic ideas about masculinity never take hold in the first place. And that’s a really hard puzzle to solve because we start behaving differently towards children, depending on what we think their gender is, literally in utero.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Jaclyn Friedman: Gender is one of the primary ways we organize our culture. It doesn’t have to be, but it happens to be so in our cultures, Western culture. Those early years, there’s not a lot of institutions that intervene in the parental child relationship without the explicit invitation of the parent, unless you’re poor and involved in the court system, in foster care and Child and Family Services. But those organizations are not helping. They’re the opposite of helping,
Dawn Serra: Often funded and run by the religious right.
Jaclyn Friedman: Yes. Which is like a whole other chapter. Right, exactly. It’s hard because you’ve got parents who grew up in the culture and haven’t necessarily done the work of thinking about what they want to pass on in terms of gender and ideas about gender. They haven’t interrogated their own. So it’s really hard to figure out how to systemically intervene when children are very young. There’s ideas in the book about how to intervene with literally little children in your actual life on an individual level. But on the systems level, it’s a tough nut to crack.
But Maine Boys to Men is at least moving their curriculum into middle school and working with middle school boys. And they’re just having some beautiful experiences. They had just done, I think, their first full year of the curriculum. What they do is, they do their workshop, which is four one hour sessions across four weeks, with the entire class of seventh or eighth grade boys, whatever the school has decided. Because then every boy is exposed to the same ideas at the same time, and it has more of an opportunity to take root. I just feel like the younger we can intervene, the more effective it’s going to be in terms of changing the way boys think about masculinity. So that we don’t have to do all the hard work of undoing those then fervently held beliefs when they’re grown men, which is a lot harder to do. It’s much easier to do it before they’ve formed their ideas.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think what’s so important too about both what you say here in the book and what we’re talking about here, and what I try to constantly stress on the show of we do have personal responsibility and personal accountability for the things we do and the ways that we impact others. But we also have to recognize that for the ways that we feel broken and invisible and hurt, as we move through our lives, these are widespread, systemic cultural problems that are constantly reinforced and upheld by enormous systems – from government, to religion, to capitalism itself.
There’s no easy answer, and there’s no single solution. And there’s no one way forward. There’s no single pill we can take that makes all of the things better. But if we can find ways to just sit in the discomfort of all of these different kind of forces that are happening, both personally and culturally, then we can start to actually see those little ways forward.
Dawn Serra: I love one of the things you talked about in the book is, “We can’t fix all these things, and no one person can take on all these things.” The best we can do is pick our spot on the wall, of the place where we feel most passionate or we have the most resources, and just start chipping away. And if enough of us start chipping away in all of these different places, ultimately, things will start to shift and crumble.
Jaclyn Friedman: Yes, exactly. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed. But you know, I had this funny experience. I thought that epilogue chapter that you’re referring to, which talks about that, was going to be this pastiche of grand visions of each of the people I profiled about what their ideal sexual culture would look like. Literally, I kept asking these brilliant people – like Sarah Deer is literally a MacArthur Genius – about their grand visions of liberated sexual culture, and they would just stare at me blankly. They would just blank.
Finally, I asked a more specific question. I said, “If you have a magic wand, what three things would you change about the field you work in?” That unlocked a lot of specific ideas. That just tells you, even the pioneers, there’s a level of thinking that can be too big. If you’re on a level of thinking, “Oh, my god. We have to change this,” – it’s making you feel paralyzed or shut down or overwhelmed – the best thing to do is not just be like, “Well, I guess I can’t help. It’s too much.” The best thing to do is take it a level more granular – “OK. Well, I can’t change the way sex ed is taught in America. But I can find out what’s being taught in the school district where I live, and see if I can talk to somebody on the school board about making it better.” That’s just one example. Whatever it is for you that if you’re feeling overwhelmed by what you think needs to change in the world, the number one best thing to do is break that change down into component parts, until you find one part that feels like you could actually make a difference on it.
Dawn Serra: One of the things that you actually talked about in the book when you’re talking about sex work was how it’s not enough for us to decriminalize sex work. We also have to destigmatize sex work. I’ve had a number of sex workers and porn performers on the show. One of the things that comes up over and over again is, if you perform in porn, or if you’re a cam girl or you’re a stripper, of course, the work that you’re doing is legal. Yet, there is no way most porn performers can walk into corporate America and get a job with that on their resume because of the stigma.
Jaclyn Friedman: Right.
Dawn Serra: You were talking about how it’s such a small thing, but it’s such an important thing of, it’s not enough for us to be talking about decriminalization, but through destigmatization, it means saying, “Yeah, I watch porn. It’s part of the media that I consume. Here’s how I pay for it and where I get really good stuff. Also, I would love to hire this sex worker, the next time my company has a job open. Just taking these small steps of just even being open in our lives, and having new conversations and challenging some of these things can be radical. It might take a long time to have that change happen. But when we start impacting people’s lives, it’s like that Youth on Fire group, for those few dozen young people who are now actually feeling like they have value in something to offer, they’re going to go out and have new relationships. And that has that ripple effect like, “How can we in our daily lives be constantly asking these questions of what can I do to just shift the dialogue a little bit or maybe where can I speak up where I normally would have remained silent?”
Jaclyn Friedman: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Or, not everybody has to invent their own activism. Find an organization who’s doing work that you support to shift the sexual culture in one way or another and call them up and say, “How can I help?” They’re probably going to give you a very non-glamorous answer. They may need you to make a donation or stuff envelopes or show up at a rally or call your legislators. The answers don’t feel particularly magical. They’re very mundane. But that’s what the work is. It’s not particularly glamorous. That’s how the change happens. And it’s OK if you don’t have your own idea about how to change the world. Not everybody is an organizer. Organizers need people to organize. Otherwise, what’s the point?
The other way to think about it also is, “What are your special talents and what issues do you care about?” You can start from that end. If you have professional skills like graphic design or you’re a lawyer or you can make a website, those sorts of things are always in great demand by nonprofit organizations or grassroots organizations, whether they’re nonprofits or not. Or, have a big sale or whatever. You can also just bring your own talents to bear.
Jaclyn Friedman: I actually think the most sustainable kinds of social change work are ones where we enjoy doing them. Getting it back to pleasure. So if you can find a way to help to do some tiny, incremental thing that also is something you actually enjoy doing, that feels good, that’s the thing you should do. Because you’re going to want to do more of it. And you’re going to do a great job. I’m so shit at doing tasks I hate doing.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my god. Yeah, I will put them off forever.
Jaclyn Friedman: Right. Then you kind of phone them in or you do them last minute or whatever. You’re always going to do a better job at something you’re enjoying.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. I also just just want to stress, you mentioned this at a couple points in the book too. But until we find a system that’s better than capitalism… Which isn’t going to happen in our lifetime. I’m quite confident. There are certainly people thinking about it. But let’s just keep this real. As long as capitalism is the system that we’re existing in, if we can even just be more mindful in how we’re spending our dollars and where we’re spending it, that can be radical to be giving money to organizations that support black families, that support indigenous rights on reservations, to pay for our porn. I mean, we don’t have to be rich to give $5 here and there, instead of spending it on something maybe that was made with child labor. I mean, it’s just these tiny little pieces where we can just ask new questions and give a little bit of our energy or a little bit of our time. When we can’t give those, if we give a little bit of our money, then it starts to add up.
Jaclyn Friedman: Amen. I don’t have anything to add to that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Well, I have so many other things I wanted to ask you about, including the delightful section all about the Satanic Temple.
Jaclyn Friedman: Oh, my god. I fucking love the Satanic Temple.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my god. It’s so good. Now, everybody listening, if you’re curious, there is actually a significant amount of one chapter talking about the Satanic Temple in relation to the religious right. So please do check out the book.
Since we are over our hour, would you mind telling everybody how they can grab the book and stay in touch with you, and check out all the deliciousness that you poured into this? Because it’s so phenomenal.
Jaclyn Friedman: Yes, yes, yes. The book is coming out on Tuesday. If you’re listening to this on the day it comes out, it’s coming out on November 14. You can just go to getunscrewed.com, and it links to all different ways to buy the book. But you can also just go to your favorite place to buy books, whatever it is. They should have it. If they don’t, request it. Make sure they have it. At getunscrewed.com, you can also find my tour schedule. I would love to see people out on book tour. I’m hitting a bunch of cities in the next month or so before it becomes holiday hell. So come up to me and tell me you heard me on Sex Gets Real. I would love to talk to you. What else? I’m so bad at this. I haven’t got my pattern down yet. You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook at @JaclynF – JACLYNF, F as in Friedman – and on Instagram at @jaclynfable. What else? Oh, I should mention, I do have my own podcast, which is also called Unscrewed, and talks about a lot of the same issues that are in the book. If you dig this conversation, you might want to subscribe to the show as well.
Dawn Serra: Well, I will have links to all the places as well as where you can buy the book at dawnserra.com for this episode and in the show notes for this episode, so you can just click through all the things. Totally check out Jaclyn’s podcast and of course, this delicious, thought-provoking book. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. I actually could have talked to you for two more hours.
Jaclyn Friedman: We’ll have to do it again.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Thank you so much, Jaclyn.
Jaclyn Friedman: It was so much fun.
Dawn Serra: To everybody listening, thank you so much for tuning in. You know I love hearing from you, so feel free to pop over to dawnserra.com. You can use the contact form which does allow an anonymous option. So submit your stories, your questions, your comments, and I will cover that on a future episode. Until next time, this is Dawn Serra. Bye!