Carter Sherman: Why Gen Z Stopped Having Sex

Everyone’s talking about Gen Z’s sex recession - but maybe it’s not about sex at all. Trevor and Eugene chat with Carter Sherman, journalist and author of The Second Coming, to discuss how maybe Gen Z’s sexual appetites are being influenced by fear, politics, power, and the way intimacy has been hijacked by the internet.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Gen Z is having a sex recession.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Twenty and thirty somethings are having less sex than previous generations and are starting their sex lives later. Gen Z have been done dirty when it comes to dating and people's views of dating is more polarizing than ever.

• 0:13Speaker 02

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

• 0:18Speaker 00

  The average fourteen year old boy today has seen more hardcore porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  Sex ed here in the United States 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.

• 0:35Speaker 00

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

• 0:48Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.

• 0:54Trevor Noah?

  This episode is presented by Whole Foods Market. Eat well for less. Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick, from Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 1:34Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users eighteen and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 2:19Trevor Noah?

  You're booked forever, forever. This episode is brought to you by Verizon.

• 2:26Trevor Noah?

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• 3:11Trevor Noah?

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• 3:39Trevor Noah?

  I'm truly so excited to have this conversation. You understand?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for having me on.

• 3:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because like sometimes you're reading a book and then it's just like fax, fax, data, data, fax, fax, fax. And then here it's like fax, data, sex.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Yeah?

• 3:53Trevor Noah?

  Good times.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Why don't you lead with that?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I mean...

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, coffee, coffee, marriage, coffee, hospitals, hospitals, research.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  You know, I like to surprise.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the secret thing that I also write about in addition to healthcare is sex, which is more fun, that's for sure.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Sherman, your husband's...

• 4:12Speaker 01

  No, it's my name.

• 4:17Trevor Noah?

  What?

• 4:19Speaker 01

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

• 4:26Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  His name is, his last name is Conway Pearson. And so I would like to combine our names and be like Conman and Sher- or Conway and Sherman and be Conman. And so I'm a journalist. I could be journalist Conman. He's a doctor. He could be Doctor Conman. I think it would be. That's the only way I would change my name.

• 4:44Trevor Noah?

  Those are some of that's, I mean, like, those are some of those things in life that are terrible in the thought.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:49Trevor Noah?

  But man, what a beautiful idea.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:52Trevor Noah?

  That would be a great one.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 4:53Trevor Noah?

  Doctor Conman. Especially if anything went wrong. You, you've, you've like immunized yourself.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:57Trevor Noah?

  What went wrong?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  What were you expecting?

• 4:59Trevor Noah?

  Well, when Doctor Conman, I'm sorry, you trusted Doctor Conman?

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Totally your fault.

• 5:04Trevor Noah?

  It just becomes that in everything. Doctor Conman.

• 5:08Speaker 01

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

• 5:11Speaker 05

  I loved your reaction when I asked if that's his surname or yours and you were like, mine? So you haven't changed your surname or you only use your surname when you're doing business?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  I haven't changed my surname.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  At all?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 5:22Trevor Noah?

  South Africa just made it, uh, did you see the, the law just changed?

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 5:26Trevor Noah?

  Now, now, I did, I was shocked that you can already do it now. Now husbands can take the woman's name.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  It was illegal to do?

• 5:32Trevor Noah?

  Now? You know when you, you learn about it? Yeah. But I was just like, wait, I didn't know that there was a law against this.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. Would you?

• 5:40Trevor Noah?

  Would I what? Take my wife's name?

• 5:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 5:43Trevor Noah?

  Depends on if her name made my name cooler or more interesting. Like it, like it's like, let's say her last name was like Weber. I wouldn't want to be like Trevor Weber.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  I don't know. I like that, actually.

• 5:53Trevor Noah?

  No, I'm not doing that.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  I actually do as well.

• 5:54Trevor Noah?

  Trevor Weber?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:55Trevor Noah?

  No, no. Now it's like I'm, I'm roasting myself everywhere I go. People are roasting me. Oh, Trevor Weber? No, I'm not. I don't want that.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Okay, maybe.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So it'd have to be like lightning?

• 6:05Trevor Noah?

  Trevor Lightning?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Trevor Noah?

  No, okay. I like that. I like that this was your, I like that this was your contribution. Trevor Lightning?

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Are you surprised by the person who's a con man?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  What's like a cool last name?

• 6:16Trevor Noah?

  No, but what I mean is like, you've got to take me like Eugene Cosa. It has a, it has a music to it.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Because you're used to it.

• 6:22Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no, it does. There's certain names that don't have a music and to those people I apologize because your parents messed you up. Carter Sherman, that has music to it. Carter Sherman, you know what I mean? Best selling author written all over it.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Somebody did tell me it would be a good name for like a airport paperback thriller writer.

• 6:38Trevor Noah?

  It would indeed.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  The latest Carter Sherman.

• 6:40Trevor Noah?

  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 there's a. Strictly not German. There we go, what? You see, you see what I'm talking about? Uma Thurman.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  I'm gonna leave here with a theme song. That's what's gonna happen here.

• 6:54Trevor Noah?

  This is, you see what I mean? These are good names. Eugene Cozer has the flow. Trevor Noah. Trevor Webber. No, Trevor Webber. It just sounds like you stumbled after saying it. I wouldn't do that. But that's, that's for your next book.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Okay. The best names, just the list of the best names.

• 7:10Trevor Noah?

  Who should take whose last name is your next book? Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I would add, I think it is cool when men take their wives' last name.

• 7:19Trevor Noah?

  Why? I also think it's cool.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Because it's unusual.

• 7:21Trevor Noah?

  Do you wanna be the unusual guy at the bar?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  I mean, not, no. It depends. Is it like, oh, I think this guy's.

• 7:29Trevor Noah?

  Mrs. Conman.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:31Trevor Noah?

  Think about this carefully.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I think that would be so fun. To sign everything as like Carter Conman, yeah.

• 7:39Trevor Noah?

  It could, you know what? It could be your natural evolution because like, I look, I look at all this, the stuff, all the stuff that you've written. 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.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:57Trevor Noah?

  And it was a piece about, um, why, why aren't condoms designed for female pleasure?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 8:03Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  I have no memory of writing this.

• 8:05Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  What's the answer?

• 8:06Trevor Noah?

  No, no, the question, you were asking the question. You were saying like, why aren't they?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:10Trevor Noah?

  Why are they not considering? 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?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Trevor Noah?

  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, it's, it's cool to see somebody's trajectory.

• 8:31Trevor Noah?

  And and and 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. 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? Like, what was that first lightning bolt in your world?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  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. I was so upset to be a seventeen year old virgin. I thought I was the

• 9:01Trevor Noah?

  Upset?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Upset. I thought I was the last seventeen year old virgin on the planet.

• 9:05Trevor Noah?

  Might have been.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it felt like it.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:18Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, had sex with this guy on her laundry room floor. I mean, it was great, it sounded like. And I 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

• 9:36Speaker 05

  The last one standing.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  I know.

• 9:38Trevor Noah?

  Wait, did you tell your mom why you were crying?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 9:40Trevor Noah?

  Wait, of course?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:42Trevor Noah?

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

• 9:47Speaker 01

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

• 9:54Trevor Noah?

  These are the families I watched in movies and thought never existed.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  But also, we're talking about

• 9:59Trevor Noah?

  Imagine.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  how people were born to be villain, I mean,

• 10:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, their villain origin story is the opposite.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  Like, Carter Sherman, the last Hyman.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  That's my next book.

• 10:10Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:16Trevor Noah?

  We're gonna transport you to a black family, a, a South African family.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  To be exact.

• 10:21Trevor Noah?

  To be exact.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:23Trevor Noah?

  Okay. I will play Carter Sherman, this Trevor Noah as Carter Sherman. All right? And then I am, I'm going to, and then you will be

• 10:31Speaker 05

  Mama Sherman?

• 10:32Trevor Noah?

  You will be my mom and dad. You can be both at the same

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Or parent Sherman.

• 10:35Trevor Noah?

  I want parent Sherman.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Okay, okay.

• 10:36Trevor Noah?

  But in South Africa.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Who was in the car with you that day?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  My mother, just my mom.

• 10:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, so just, just the two of us, all right? And Action.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  Hehehe.

• 10:45Trevor Noah?

  And then?

• 10:45Speaker 06

  Hehehe. Hehehe. Hehehe.

• 10:51Trevor Noah?

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

• 10:55Speaker 06

  So, so, so, sorry mum, sorry mama, sorry. It was just such a hard day mum, it was such a hard day.

• 11:02Trevor Noah?

  What happened?

• 11:03Speaker 06

  Uh, uh, my friend texted me mum and I found out that I'm the last virgin, I'm the only person who's not getting sex mum.

• 11:11Trevor Noah?

  What?

• 11:12Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 11:12Trevor Noah?

  You had a phone at school.

• 11:14Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 11:14Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 11:16Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 11:18Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 11:20Trevor Noah?

  Oh man. Okay, wait, so your mom?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Wow, she shouldn't have had that. We have to.

• 11:25Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 11:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 11:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:39Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 11:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, mum.

• 11:40Trevor Noah?

  Your mum is black.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  What's up?

• 11:44Trevor Noah?

  Oh, this is amazing. Oh, wow, this is amazing.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Really, yeah.

• 11:48Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  I, she, of course, totally forgot this story, because you know how parents just fully forget the experiences that shape you forever? 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. And I was like, okay, I get it. Like, you were not a virgin at seventeen. Cool, thank you for that. She really wanted to impress upon me.

• 12:12Trevor Noah?

  Ah. Yeah, but, but.

• 12:16Trevor Noah?

  I feel like, I feel like that, that story.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  Oh, man, sorry.

• 12:20Trevor Noah?

  It's, it's, it's the perfect jumping off point into, into what, you know, it's, I don't know if there's right or wrong in it, I think rightly and wrongly, our obsession with sex. 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, why aren't we more obsessed with sex? In that it is, it is the thing that means most of us are here.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:41Trevor Noah?

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

• 12:44Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 12:46Trevor Noah?

  But what I love about your book is, and, 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, because I think you do it amazingly, is like. 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, let's talk about virginity. You know, when you look at virginity throughout the decades, it's amazing how it changes. Cause you're, 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, the tears are because people aren't a, a virgin. Do you know what I mean?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  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. Like it is essential to maintain your virginity.

• 13:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  In a lot of places at risk of, I mean, potentially even death, depending on where you are in the world. And 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. 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. Like all of them felt like having held on to 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. I talked to one young man who, but like as soon as at 14, he started feeling really bad.

• 14:05Trevor Noah?

  14?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  At 14, yeah, that he had not yet had sex.

• 14:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 01

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

• 14:23Trevor Noah?

  So do you find that, are people just lying about having sex? Or are they?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 14:28Trevor Noah?

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

• 14:34Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's lying so much as we don't really have open conversations about sex. 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, not lying, but maybe embellishing stories or talking about like only the good stuff.

• 14:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  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. 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. I think that we see sex oftentimes as something that like should be private. 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 even our ability to have the kind of sex that we like.

• 15:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there's some, there's some parts of the book where it feels like, it feels like you're, you're forcing us to ask the question, who is obsessed with whose sex and why? And what does it, what does it mean? You know, like when I was, when I was reading through it, I was thinking of, 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? 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, there's a what, what? And there's like, they always have these like, these, these catchphrases.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:58Trevor Noah?

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

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Why do we love telling young people that they're doing sex wrong?

• 16:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that in a lot of ways, like controlling how young people have sex means you control the future. 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. I mean, I would also argue that there's probably some element amongst people as we get older and maybe lose some of our sex appeal that we feel like.

• 16:46Trevor Noah?

  Jealous.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, 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 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.

• 17:03Trevor Noah?

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

• 17:09Speaker 01

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

• 17:12Trevor Noah?

  You don't be, hey, you're Eugene Cozer, you don't forget that.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Thank you, Trevor.

• 17:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 17:18Trevor Noah?

  You, I don't care what happens in your life, you'd never forget that, right? Yes, she's a great author, and you might be useless at everything, but you're still Eugene Cozer.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Your name has a, what did you say?

• 17:28Trevor Noah?

  Your name has a musicality to it. You don't forget that.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Guys, I don't know what to say, I'm, I'm touched, I mean.

• 17:36Trevor Noah?

  Thank you, Eugene.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Thank you for seeing me, guys.

• 17:38Trevor Noah?

  We see you.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  You're welcome. We can all go now, we're done here. What was your question?

• 17:44Speaker 05

  My thing is, you're absolutely right, it almost feels like sex, money, religion are the only levers that parents can still use to control their children. And once they've lost one, they'll try to cling on to another, because while they're still your dependents, you can tell them what car to drive, what, how they must do at school because you are paying.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  And then you can also tell them, yeah, if you become morally corrupt by having sex, all of this goes away.

• 18:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 18:35Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  They do accept that premarital sex is a normal part of life. 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, medically accurate information about things like condoms and STIs and pregnancy prevention.

• 18:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  But what we see instead in this country is an extreme support among politicians and institutions for absence-only sex ed. The US government has, since 2000, poured more than $2 billion into absence-only sex ed, which in general does not work.

• 19:06Trevor Noah?

  $2 billion?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  $2 billion.

• 19:08Trevor Noah?

  Into convincing people that they should not have sex?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Until marriage.

• 19:13Trevor Noah?

  $2 billion?

• 19:16Speaker 05

  We're in the wrong business.

• 19:19Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  Who did I get? Did I get Trevor Noah or Trevor Weber?

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Well, like, what?

• 19:24Speaker 05

  You just...

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Two billion dollars.

• 19:27Speaker 01

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

• 19:39Trevor Noah?

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

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's true that absence is the only way to totally avoid getting things like STIs or getting pregnant. And, but I think that that is not only the message that's communicated through absence-only sex ed. 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. 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.

• 20:25Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  So as a man and a woman get married, they have 2.5 kids, man works,

• 20:29Trevor Noah?

  What's the point five?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  The dog?

• 20:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I've always loved that point five.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  But never in black families have I had over a point five?

• 20:38Speaker 05

  Never.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  It's always, maybe it's like the always the possibility of more children.

• 20:41Trevor Noah?

  Or you just count your neighbor's child, if they have three and you have two.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Oh, that's the, that's the point five.

• 20:46Trevor Noah?

  That's the half.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Okay, got it.

• 20:48Speaker 01

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

• 21:07Trevor Noah?

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

• 21:12Speaker 01

  They're talking about a way that they want the United States to look.

• 21:14Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn. Damn.

• 21:18Trevor Noah?

  So when you dig into it, you know, like, when I came across your work, it was, it was around, there were all these headlines about the sex recession. That's what, 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, what is this? And you, 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. What does that mean for your children? And you'd see all these headlines. And you really, 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, no sex, or I don't want sex.

• 21:59Trevor Noah?

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

• 22:10Speaker 01

  I think we take the idea of sex as being like good in and of itself. For whatever reason, 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.

• 22:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  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. 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. And so like the reason I I find all these headlines about the sex recession to be very interesting is because I think we don't actually interrogate what sex 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? And I think that that's what we're not really talking about. And I think the way that the

• 23:09Speaker 01

  sex recession headline happens is it sounds really dramatic and you can't understand why people would avoid having sex because sex is kind of fun. But I think that it's

• 23:19Trevor Noah?

  Kind of fun.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, kind of fun. Yeah, I like it.

• 23:28Trevor Noah?

  You know, kind of fun.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Sex is kind of fun.

• 23:35Trevor Noah?

  That's a great sticker, by the way. Sex is kind of fun.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it's breaking news right here. I don't know if anyone's heard.

• 23:49Trevor Noah?

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• 24:34Trevor Noah?

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• 25:19Trevor Noah?

  Terms apply. Cancel anytime.

• 25:23Trevor Noah?

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• 26:08Trevor Noah?

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• 26:33Trevor Noah?

  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. But how do they express themselves? What do they say their views on sex are or aren't? What is happening from the inside?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I mean, there's definitely no one.

• 26:56Trevor Noah?

  Nothing's happening on the inside. No, that's not what I meant, Eugene. That was a great joke, but that's not what I meant. Sorry, yes.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. I love a sex fun. I want to be really clear. I don't know if the headline or the title of the book made that clear. But I mean, I think it depends on who you're talking to. Like people, these young people, I interviewed more than 100 people under 30 for the book. 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. 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. They all, virtually all of them had had sex education that they thought was incompetent. There was a lot of references to, if you've seen the movie Mean Girls,

• 27:48Speaker 01

  you know how Coach Carr says, like, if you have sex, you will die. A lot of people unprompted brought up that exact analogy to me and said that that's what their sex ed was like. 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. They didn't have friends that they felt like they could speak openly about sex with. 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.

• 28:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

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

• 28:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:29Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 28:30Speaker 01

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

• 28:58Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's interesting because society tells you what your story is a lot of the time, you know?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:16Trevor Noah?

  So if I, if I think of it from a young man's perspective, when you're a young man, you're sold a story of yourself. 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 Superbad, a movie like Superbad, or for me, growing up, American Pie. You know what I mean? It's just you gotta lose your virginity by prom, man. You gotta lose it by prom, man. Come on. You get what I'm saying?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Trevor Noah?

  But there's this idea, and even in those stories, and don't get me wrong, those are comedians, 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, you know, if you're queer, if you're any, if you identify as anything, there's a 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 a better word.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  It's harder to make it real.

• 30:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Or to see it out in the real world. There is this concept that I came across while I was reporting the book called Hegemonic Masculinity.

• 30:20Trevor Noah?

  Hegemonic Masculinity.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:40Trevor Noah?

  Good at obtaining it?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:42Trevor Noah?

  And also wanted.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Also wanted. So like, there's not a lot of space in those stereotypes for men to have the feelings that they do have about sex. And I feel like we've done a very good job in the United States over the last fifty years of expanding the ways that we think about like women's relationship with sex in some ways. And, you know, 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 like swirling around inside them. But like, we haven't even created the space for men to start having those conversations or thinking about those stuff for themselves. And so I, when I was interviewing these young men, they talked a lot about dealing with

• 31:27Speaker 01

  those stereotypes and feeling like they had to be a particular kind of way.

• 31:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I remember having a, yeah, a conversation about this. It was, um, I forget where this was, but it was, there was, there was a panel that was being hosted and there was some really interesting psychologists talking about it. And then afterwards, there's a little break off and everyone's just chatting. And one of the therapists there, they, they, they were family therapists, sex therapists, all of this, they said something that stuck with me for years. They said, "We've lived in a world where men have been taught that they only think about sex and sex has no feelings. And we've taught women that sex is only their feelings and it defines them as a human being and you, you know, it's, it's the most, it's the most valuable, powerful, like, oh, this is your, and so you, you have this imbalance

• 32:14Trevor Noah?

  where men go, "Stick it in, good times." And then women like, "It is my sanctity." 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. They do have a warmth. They do have a tenderness. They, 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. It is not only your sanctity, it's just yours." So, you know what I mean? 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." Do you know what I'm saying?

• 32:53Speaker 05

  I, 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. For example, cigarette smoking.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Going, um, remember those ads where you used to see guys and girls at the beach? Having a a bonfire?

• 33:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  Car ads, this famous Mustang one where there's a woman and the man and the arm over. Have you noticed how car ads look now? It's usually one guy driving it being responsible.

• 33:26Trevor Noah?

  Or it's like a family or yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 05

  Yes, but it's never.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Car ads are wildly gendered, I have to say.

• 33:32Trevor Noah?

  They really are.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'll pop up while 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. And like, those are the two genders of cars.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  They don't sell the M three or the the whatever fancy super sports car with a man and a woman. The only time you see that is when you're watching those videos of people in Monaco. So now people have sold, have have, brands have stopped being interested in selling sex to use to sell a product. So I think now when kids that are younger, Gen Zs, look, this is 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. 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.

• 34:15Trevor Noah?

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

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Yes, but that's why kids now, when you ask them, what do you want to be? They say, rich or?

• 34:23Trevor Noah?

  Famous.

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Yes, 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 one or the other. It's either a guy, macho macho guy in a car by himself.

• 34:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Or you have a whole guy with five kids and the person's like, I'm sixteen, I don't want.

• 34:39Trevor Noah?

  I don't want either of these outcomes.

• 34:41Speaker 05

  Sex must have come with these ones.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I I mean, but it's interesting though, because young people are growing up on, you know, on an internet that is saturated with sex. Like they're being exposed to so many more different kinds of sexuality than we ever had growing up. I mean, I'm thirty one, so I grew up a bit on the internet, but not in the way that young people are now. And so I think that this is also sort of one of the questions that perplexes people with the sex recession. It's 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.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And yet not having I R L sex. And so I think that it's 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.

• 35:24Trevor Noah?

  Is that part of the problem, though, in like?

• 35:26Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. It is.

• 35:27Trevor Noah?

  You know, when we when we think when we think about sex.

• 35:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:30Trevor Noah?

  And you 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 for the like, yes, you can say the sex ed, but you know, as you as you write and as we've seen, sex ed has has dropped its um, the the the window that it thinks of sex through. So it tells you like the the the the the physical function of sex. This is a penis, it goes into a vagina.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Hey Baba.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  We still from Africa eh?

• 36:11Trevor Noah?

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

• 36:15Trevor Noah?

  what do you think that's also done to to? Not that it was better per se, but there's a flattening of sex and its edu and the education that goes around it.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  It means that you have to go to the internet.

• 36:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Right, because all they hear in school is like, don't have sexual die.

• 36:33Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And then they open up their phone or their laptop or whatever, and then they see porn. I mean, three quarters of American teenagers have seen porn by the time they're eighteen. 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. 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. And like, young people do say like, oh, I know that porn is not accurate. And yet they still rely on it for this.

• 37:08Speaker 05

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

• 37:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not telling them a lot, like, because porn is scripted, right?

• 37:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  It's basically.

• 37:21Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  I know, I'm so sorry. I'm yet again, breaking news here on the podcast.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Mister penis over here is surprised.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  Captain Penis.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  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 Grand Theft Auto.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  It's just not, it has very little to do with what real life sex looks like and.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  What does Qatar real life sex, because obviously it's bang, bang, choo.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  Swing from the chandeliers.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Wow, what porn are you watching? Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Please send me that link Eugene.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  I got you fam.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  We'll put that in the show notes. Let's get that link to everyone. I want to watch that video.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  It sounds acrobatic.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  It really sounded fantastic.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  And classy, there's a chandelier.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. This was a really nice set that they promptly.

• 38:17Speaker 05

  It's called sexy soleil.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Oh, soleil, I see what you did there. Nicely done.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  Oh, nicely done.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  You need to catch up on the sex porn, by the way. I don't feel like you're really pulling your weight.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  So what, so if, if that's advertised clearly through these clips that they watch and these movies that they watch, what is the reality of it? Because we're so quick to say that's not realistic, but what's the realistic part of it?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  What is realistic about porn?

• 38:47Speaker 05

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

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it's, it's not showing like communication. 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, that's, to be honest, sex, in addition to being kind of fun, is usually fairly inelegant. And like, none of those things are present in porn, because porn is very sleek and scripted, and these are professionals operating on a closed track. 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. And so what I found was interesting in the book is I kind of had thought

• 39:35Speaker 01

  that young people on the right would be opposed to porn. 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 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. And that story can have more power than the actual facts. And we see this in politics all the time, right? 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. And so the deep story among young people is that porn has been very bad for them. 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

• 40:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:34Trevor Noah?

  If you're under 40.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 40:52Trevor Noah?

  Right, yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  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. 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. 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.

• 41:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, as you're saying this, I realize... The paradox of not having a thought out and centralized form of education means that the normal becomes defined by the abnormal. Oh, wow. You know what I mean? Because you just said choking is not normal. Yeah. And then I went, except when it is.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:44Trevor Noah?

  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 twelve or thirteen years old and I remember seeing, 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. 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 plucked your lips and you.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Camera swirls around them.

• 42:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  You can't really get a good view of what's happening.

• 42:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's exactly that. You know what I mean? And then one day, there were tongues and there were more tongues and there were more tongues. But now if you said to somebody kissing with your tongue is not normal, they go like, what are you talking about? That's, that's weird that you're not opening your mouth. What's wrong with you? So the, the paradox then becomes that normal does exist, or rather like the Overton window of normal exists. But what's really wrong is where, is how it's being defined. You know, it's like if nobody's talking about the thing that's not happening in porn, then porn becomes the only teacher in, in, in essence, you know what I mean?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is they're also like, they're not even really talking about it either.

• 42:53Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah. Silence. Silence is the, yeah, yeah. Two billion dollars to be quiet.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  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 stories and studies where like women would talk about having a guy without asking uses belt around their neck.

• 43:10Trevor Noah?

  Uses what?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  His belt.

• 43:11Trevor Noah?

  His belt?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:12Trevor Noah?

  Oh, geez.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Or like a necklace to choke her. And it's like, you know, these are things that can be dangerous.

• 43:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And if you like it, do it safely, consensually, again. 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.

• 43:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  As a resource that people can find in institutions.

• 43:33Trevor Noah?

  I also think there's a, there's a, there's an ex, like, um. There's almost an amplification effect that can happen with algorithms and social media. Cause 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? 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. You make whatever video you wanna 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, 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. Because if I don't know it, do I know sex?

• 44:18Trevor Noah?

  And do I wanna be mocked? And do I wanna be teased? And do I wanna be to to to rewind to back in my day? But I remember in in high school. How? 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. 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? And it was like, uh, uh, uh. And it's like, if you don't know, exactly like that, Eugene. See, I taught you well.

• 44:49Trevor Noah?

  But it was.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  This podcast is not sex ed. I just.

• 44:54Trevor Noah?

  You said one billion dollars. You had us there. Yeah, you had us there. Two billion dollars. We're coming for that billion. We're doing our best here. But no, what I, yeah, it's it's. Do you see what I mean? The conundrum is like you you're in a world where.

• 45:10Trevor Noah?

  It's as you, as you so eloquently say, you've got women 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 wanna get there and then not know what the thing is. And you don't wanna 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, it's the blind leading the blind.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Well, it also, I mean, it goes back to what we're talking about with like these stereotypes of masculinity. Where this idea that men have to know everything about sex and should be good at sex. 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. It's not like, oh, men are just telling men to be this way. 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.

• 46:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  And I should say, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was also explain like porn is not a monolith.

• 46:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And a lot of the young women I talked to, they're, the kind of porn that they liked wasn't video porn. It was something like erotica, or fanfiction, or romance novels, which oftentimes can also feature rough sex. But because they also had this idea of like rough sex from those forms of pornography, like they brought that to the table as well. 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.

• 46:52Speaker 01

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

• 47:02Trevor Noah?

  Oh geez, yeah, that's a good point.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  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, instead of uh sex health education, they should focus more on sex mental health education.

• 47:35Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn.

• 47:36Speaker 05

  Their ability to connect or disconnect should the act not go right. 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. And then finally, when the act is done, you realize you don't have to be someone that you are not all along.

• 47:53Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:54Speaker 05

  Because again, of the romanticization of relationships and the end goal being sex. And on the other end, it's the now that we've done it, let's talk.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, advocates of comprehensive sex, I would say, like,

• 48:04Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Healthy relationship.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Education is also a part of sex ed.

• 48:08Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Healthy relationship.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like how to talk about your relationships, your feelings, the sex you wanna be having. Like, that could also be a part of sex ed. And honestly, the first time someone said that to me, I was like, my mind has been blown. But, cause I thought I had pretty good sex ed. Like, my sex ed, I'm from Seattle, Washington, which is a very liberal place. And it talked about S G I's and it talked about condoms and it talked about pregnancy prevention. But it did do its best to pathologize sex. Like, they had us watch a video of, I think, this woman was giving birth to a sixteen pound baby. Which is huge. It's large. Yeah. What's the point of that video other than to make me afraid of sex?

• 48:49Trevor Noah?

  Well.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I am, I would love to track down the woman from that video and be like, what's up? Why did you participate in this?

• 48:58Trevor Noah?

  That's one way to learn.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but and 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. 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.

• 49:16Trevor Noah?

  Is part of this because parents are also saying, I don't want my kids learning about sex? Cause you, you, you see that happening more and more in America. And I mean, but it, it, 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. 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 but how much of it is that? How much, how much of it is, is like we, we sort of blame the schooling system. But parents oftentimes can shake what a schooling system does or doesn't teach.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I think it's a vocal minority of

• 49:51Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's okay.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  The way that you're describing, and I think we especially see that in the United States post 2020 and post the pandemic.

• 49:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Where, you know, we've always had a lot of conversations around sex and ed and a lot of fighting around sex ed here in the US. 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.

• 50:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I describe in the book, um, 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. And during this school board meeting, parents were coming up and talking about things that, I mean, I struggled even understand what they were saying because it didn't make any sense. Like they were talking about, I kept on having to rewind and be like, am I hearing this right? 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. And they were talking about, oh, comprehensive sex ed is just a way to, you know, make students gay or trans and consent,

• 51:00Speaker 01

  even of itself, consent even by itself is a gateway word is what one, um, actually a 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, what's it, man, boy student, man, boy, national man, boy, a national American man, boy, love association. Sorry, that took me a minute.

• 51:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  To like, consent is a gateway word so that those organizations, Planned Parenthood, NAMBLA, et cetera, can sink their hooks into these young people. And I'm paraphrasing what he said, but it was a very staggering thing to hear.

• 51:36Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  And obviously it doesn't have anything to do with reality.

• 51:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

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

• 51:49Trevor Noah?

  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. I I I truly feel bad for those parents because I think they sort of care the most. Do you know what I mean? 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. 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 it, you see a story of grooming. You see people come out and say they were groomed from a young age. I it it's so hard to say to that person, because I I and I've been guilty of this, don't get me wrong. Because I would dismissively go like, that's not a thing.

• 52:33Trevor Noah?

  But then I'm like, ah, man, but how do you, how do you get through to people? Or how do you help them balance out the weighting of risk? Because they're saying, I'm trying to protect my child at all costs. And then you want to go, yes, but what cost is too great? At what point are you not protecting the child, you you know? Because it it is a tough one, because they are teachers who've molested kids, there are kids who, you know what I mean? It's this weird.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I mean, the world is a scary place and schools are a scary place.

• 53:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but you see, 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 the at the same time. But most of the world is not a scary place. You know, like people like, ah, I'm scared of flying, but they're scared of flying because of the plane crashes we focused on.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:21Trevor Noah?

  But there's no news story about planes that land. There just, there just aren't, you know, and

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:26Trevor Noah?

  And we do this with everything, 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.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Accurately gauging risks.

• 53:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's, it's, you know?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think also during the pandemic in particular, you know, people were trapped at home

• 53:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  on their computers, looking constantly at bad news and conspiracy theories proliferated.

• 53:49Trevor Noah?

  You said bad nudes.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Oh, well, for that too.

• 53:53Trevor Noah?

  Trapped with bad nudes.

• 53:54Speaker 06

  I was like, eh, man, I've been.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  There's nothing worth than lockdown with bad news, lockdown on itself.

• 53:59Speaker 06

  And I'm like, I know the stores are running, running up raises now.

• 54:03Trevor Noah?

  You you. Let actually, let's talk about social media, because you you talk about what you call the fuckability trap, you know? Hey, hey.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Carter.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, yes. Oh, okay. I didn't realize that was approval, thank you.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  That, what is it again?

• 54:20Trevor Noah?

  The fuckability trap.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I have to credit, fuckability is not my concept. It's a concept of this philosopher, whose name I'm definitely gonna mispronounce. It's Amia Sivastian? I'm so sorry, so sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. But she is a philosopher who talks about, basically fuckability is sexual desire as constructed by our, our politics.

• 54:43Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 54:44Speaker 01

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

• 54:58Trevor Noah?

  No, but, but the trap that you were talking about, and you see, this, this is where I, like, I get stuck because it's so complicated and layered. You talk about social media and how we're, we're given these signals. We're, we're shown these signals. Post a picture of yourself, you know, just sitting in a park, drinking your coffee. Yeah, get a few likes. Post the same picture in a bikini, likes go up. Go back to a picture of you reading a book, a few likes. Bikini, likes go up and, and, and.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Am I reading in the bikini in this case? Yeah.

• 55:34Trevor Noah?

  Cut. I mean, that's good.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  I mean, look, everybody, everybody wants to be smart and hot. Like, that's the goal.

• 55:41Trevor Noah?

  That is the goal. Can I tell, and I, can I tell you, we need to normalize that by the way.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  I'm so jealous of that line because I wish I had it.

• 55:46Trevor Noah?

  No, but it's true though.

• 55:49Trevor Noah?

  No, I, I like this because I feel like we, 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, it shouldn't like exist. And, and maybe, maybe that goes into this, this conversation. But, but like, what did you notice in how social media has played a role in how we define ourselves and portray ourselves in, in, in society in and around sex?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  I think it is exactly what you're talking about with. The bikini photos and the ways that those are valued more. 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. And he's like, I'm probably gonna like her more. Like, he's gonna be more into her. 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. And they can quantify what makes them appear to be sexually desirable to other people.

• 56:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, appear to be being the key phrase.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Right. 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. They think about what their bodies look like and how other people think about their bodies. 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, you know, if sex is another occasion for you to be judged and found wanting, you're not gonna do it. If you feel like your body is perfect, has to look perfect in order to get naked, you're probably just not gonna get naked.

• 57:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I think about when I was young, 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? 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.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:43Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, what does that do to you?

• 57:44Speaker 05

  And you can see it now, yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  That would be devastating.

• 57:46Trevor Noah?

  But that's what's happening. Think about it.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 57:48Trevor Noah?

  Because before, you could go like, oh, that's a supermodel. And I'm not that, and that's the beauty standard. 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. 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. And so now it's not just an aspirational thing that you cannot reach.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a realistic one.

• 58:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 05

  You see it here. Right here and right now.

• 58:23Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, also, we've been given, young people have been given many more tools to make themselves appear more attractive.

• 58:31Trevor Noah?

  Ah, damn.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:50Speaker 05

  She catfished herself.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  I mean, kind of. And she was saying, like, that's a terrible feeling.

• 58:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Like, looking at your own face and 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. And so, you're, again, just constantly being compared and contrasted and falling short.

• 59:15Trevor Noah?

  Could, could that be one of the things? I don't, I don't know. I don't, I haven't done any research in this field, but could that be one of the factors? 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 you, you, to your, what you just said, the catfishing of it all. I know how I look online. I don't want to show up in person, because I can't, I can't do anything. There's no filter.

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Can't match it, yeah.

• 59:40Trevor Noah?

  I can't, 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. 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?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  I think that what has happened for young people, like, just so much more of their lives has been outsourced online. And the pandemic contributed to this, right? Because these are young people who are growing up, like, they didn't have prom, they didn't have graduation.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  Missed a few years of school.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they missed a lot of the sort of teenage.

• 1:00:13Trevor Noah?

  Formative moments.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, the ways that, the moments that teach you how to handle being embarrassed or being rejected, or just the nuances of human connection. 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.

• 1:00:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  An I R O.

• 1:00:29Speaker 05

  Real life.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  Battle experience.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  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. Instead of being rejected.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Cut, I'm gonna tell you the truth, ne. There's some moment back in my life where I look back and I'm like, why did you date me? But.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  You but you know what it did for my self esteem? It took it from here to the that was real battle life and also so I've decide every year I do charity drive. I date someone who I wouldn't. It's my outreach.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So generous of you.

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I write it off with my taxes. I'm like, no, this is time I will never get back.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  You are a philanthropist.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  A few tanks of gas that I used and I put my credit card, I write it off and I'm going, okay, this is my corporate social responsibility. Like 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, ne. 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? Now they look at me going, I dated that guy and the person behaves.

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  No, I love that idea that they're using you as the imagery. So they go like, I'm just picturing a couple right now. And then the husband is saying something, I don't know if this is working for working for you. Do you know who I used to date? And then they pull up your profile and like, hmm, you dated him, yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Why is he wearing a bikini and reading a book in the in the pub?

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  He's smart and hot, yeah.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  So but that's my thing on on let's.

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  But you're right, though. Good. No, but I I do like the point behind which is beautiful and we forget that it's all real life.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:02:14Speaker 06

  We often will say like the the the bad and the but man, the good of real life as well. Being real life accepted, being real life chosen.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  Phew.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  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. And then at that moment, you feel, you know, shattered, broken, but you go, I 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. And when you're in your weight class, you're like, no, man, I actually can do better than you. And then but I think the kraftmakra of relationships. Is what's missing is it's the end goal has become the win where people I've heard people saying why would I wanna go out there and meet people where I could be sitting here watching porn.

• 1:02:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  I've heard people saying that.

• 1:02:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:03:07Trevor Noah?

  It's all outcome based.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 05

  It's Netflix and chill and then we skip to URL and then we come back again 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 or 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.

• 1:03:28Trevor Noah?

  It's so beautiful, Eugene.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  Thank you, Trevor.

• 1:03:29Trevor Noah?

  So beautiful.

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:03:31Trevor Noah?

  I'm touched and I think inspired as well. I think a lot of people don't consider.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  Imagine what kind of impact you would have with your reach with

• 1:03:42Speaker 05

  with your everything. You can just the the impact. I mean, you can have one in Harlem, the Bronx. You can outreach even in Africa, you can definitely do an outreach where a person can say, look who I took herself and look, I dated this person. Then you can just lift up your self esteem one girl at a time. Sometimes a man here and there. But if if anyone can do both. I've seen the things you do when no one is looking.

• 1:04:10Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  I've got you.

• 1:04:16Trevor Noah?

  That's me almost crying. Thank you. Beautiful. Over to you, Gata.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. I don't have anything to add. It was, yeah.

• 1:04:26Trevor Noah?

  Don't press anything. We've got more. What now? After this.

• 1:04:32Trevor Noah?

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• 1:05:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, one of my favorite Youtube Premium features is Smart Downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, "Ah, I forgot to download anything!" And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, "Download, download, download, download." You're on the plane, "Download, download, download, download." There's no wifi. "I wish I downloaded." Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart Downloads, basically, thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, Youtube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like Youtube, you'll love Youtube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium.

• 1:06:02Trevor Noah?

  Terms apply. Cancel anytime. I think one of the things you realize when you start caring about clothes is that simple doesn't have to mean basic. Because a t-shirt is a t-shirt until you find the right t-shirt. Ooh, then suddenly you're talking about the cut, the fit, the weight, the way it falls on your body. Then you're like, "No, no, no. You don't understand. Look at the sleeve." And that's what I've really enjoyed about Quince. One of my favorite things is their Pima Cotton Lux Touch t-shirts. And it's become one of those pieces I keep reaching for. The cotton has this really smooth, premium feel to it. The fit is great. And it just lays really nicely. And I think that's what you sometimes take for granted with simple clothes.

• 1:06:47Trevor Noah?

  When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit. You can throw on a jacket, a sweater, whatever you want, but everything works because you started with the right thing. That's what I like about Quince. It feels premium without feeling like you're trying too hard. It's effortless. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:07:39Trevor Noah?

  Wait, let's talk about sexting.

• 1:07:44Trevor Noah?

  Throughout time, the way humans have expressed their sexuality has constantly evolved and changed. And you spend 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. 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. Has there been a shift?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  I mean, it might be sexting. 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.

• 1:08:20Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  I know, really puts the fear of the New York Times into you.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  But now I think like everybody sends nudes.

• 1:08:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  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. And that's just how it is. And so I don't think that like sexting isn't inherently bad thing. I think it gets stigmatized a lot of the time because it's new and because it's lewd.

• 1:08:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but one day it could be the norm. Ask not what pictures your president can send to you. Ask what pictures you can send to your president.

• 1:09:04Speaker 05

  As your best Kennedy ever.

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  Even the Kennedy with a with a bad radio speaker.

• 1:09:14Speaker 05

  Kennedy's like, I never started a bad.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  I knew you had it in you.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  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. 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. 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. 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 and actually leaking somebody else's nudes without their consent is a violation.

• 1:10:08Trevor Noah?

  But to your point, the difficulty, and I think this is something we we struggle with in society across the board. We love flipping between binaries, 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? 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? And I remember, like, I think of

• 1:10:34Speaker 05

  Goes from exclusive to super inclusive.

• 1:10:36Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:10:40Trevor Noah?

  Nelson Mandela, for instance, a lot of people wondered why he said, when he was like, 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 like, why is he saying that? 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. And and sometimes people miss that. And I think when you're saying that.

• 1:11:04Trevor Noah?

  To go back to what your parents said, that is one of the dichotomies that we also face in this world. One half of sending nudes and your nudes getting leaked is not your fault because somebody leaked your nudes.

• 1:11:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:11:17Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Trevor Noah?

  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 gray. 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 that a nude can be, I'm not saying it's good if it happens here. I'm not saying you deserve it and I'm saying should. But just understand that there's a risk that you're taking. But on the other hand, even if that risk, if you are a victim of that, I'm not gonna now blame you.

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:11:48Trevor Noah?

  But understand like the, the, the complicated ramifications of this thing, you know?

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the flipping from one side to the other, like you just, it's a rejection of reality.

• 1:11:58Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Because reality is always in the middle.

• 1:12:00Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:06Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like that, actually.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

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

• 1:12:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Trevor Noah?

  Because it was, because it was never porn in that way.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  At all.

• 1:12:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I think the wording around it gives these tech companies plausible deniability because once they get dragged in to what they allow someone else to do.

• 1:12:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Speaker 05

  As a proxy of someone else's uh, uh, willingness, then they'll be in trouble, right?

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Well, there's new, I mean, advocates now would say instead of using revenge porn, we should use terms like non-consensual image abuse or intimate image abuse.

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, you nailed it.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:13:01Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Trevor Noah?

  How do we expand that into the world of dealing with sex and the way we think about it? 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. What have you found has happened in the past few years?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  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. 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. And Title IX is the federal civil rights law that protects against sex discrimination in education. And it has become a political football over how we should be treating 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.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  And that sparked a huge backlash from the right that said that, you know, this was overreached by the Obama administration. 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. 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. And this, amongst other changes, made it, as one activist told me, basically Title IX became unusable for survivors.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  It just did not do-

• 1:15:05Trevor Noah?

  It became a kangaroo court.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:15:14Trevor Noah?

  We're going the opposite direction.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Right. And then, so like, basically, it's now, 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-

• 1:15:28Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:15:30Trevor Noah?

  Ah, how long have we been in here?

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  I mean, what is interesting is like, there are things.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  So like, in between, I mean, writing a book takes time, 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. And so the Title IX rules have reverted at this point to what they were underneath the Trump administration. 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.

• 1:16:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  And not really being, the nuances of it not really being reckoned with, just people, again, flipping from one side to the other. And, you know, I think we have to think about, like, what is a college campus? Like, a college campus is where people go and learn about the world. 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? Sex or rape is one of the, rape is one of the number one reasons that women leave college campuses.

• 1:16:57Trevor Noah?

  Damn, no way.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  And so when that happens, we're creating a situation where women are less able to flourish. 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. And so we create, like, a snowball effect here when we don't take sexual abuse and harassment on college campuses seriously in all kinds of ways.

• 1:17:19Trevor Noah?

  It's also, um, I always feel like it's also a little disingenuous to deal with the people who are dealing with the ramifications of a system without thinking of the system itself.

• 1:17:33Trevor Noah?

  Like, like, one of the biggest ones that throws me in my daily life is, I'll think about, like, drunk driving. 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. Let's say you were drunk at the time, so you couldn't agree.

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  Altered state.

• 1:17:54Trevor Noah?

  You were in an altered state.

• 1:17:57Trevor Noah?

  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. But I'm like, yeah, but that same law in another instance says you did not have the capacity to make a decision. Do you know what I mean? And it's these small paradoxes that are complicated and that's what law needs to get into. 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. But the messiness of the system isn't dealt with, like whenever these college things came up, I would see them have all these conversations, but very seldom would I see colleges say, what do we think about how we allow alcohol on a campus?

• 1:18:42Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? 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 gonna 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 and you with me? And sometimes I think it's such a, it's such a short sighted and, and, 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. Then it goes, it's just gonna keep going back and forth. And the institutions never actually have to ask themselves, wait, what environments are we creating to your point in educating in?

• 1:19:26Trevor Noah?

  They, they do those campus tours. They tell you about the morals of the camp, this is what it's like to be a student here. This is where you should go for this, this is. I feel like even on that level, colleges should say, hey, we're gonna teach you about sex on campus. This is part of your onboarding. Yeah. This is part, not sex also in life, but we're gonna like, we're gonna talk about sex in a college setting. We're gonna talk to people about sex. We're gonna talk to you about shame. We're gonna talk to you about pleasure. We're gonna talk to you. But these things are all part of sex itself. And if we don't, we're just gonna 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 random school teacher that taught them nothing. Hmm. And then we wonder why there's so many breakdowns in that world. Do you know, do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:26Trevor Noah?

  Oh, got it.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:20:35Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:20:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  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. Like, that was not a standard question that I had because I didn't necessarily wanna put people into a space that they weren't willing to talk about it.

• 1:20:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:19Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  You know, post, I did ask young people, you know, can you tell me about a uh, cultural or social or political event that shaped your approach to sex? And almost all of them said me too. That 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. Um, 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.

• 1:21:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:58Trevor Noah?

  And yet again, they're also not at work.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Right. And so it just. 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. Like, is the law always the best mechanism for dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault?

• 1:22:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's a great question, actually.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:22:34Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  And so I felt like, 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.

• 1:22:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  And like, maybe Title IX, we at least need to be talking about Title IX as more than a political football in this environment. 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. 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.

• 1:23:10Trevor Noah?

  It's a noble thought, but I can't, no, I can't, I can't.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  No, fair enough, yeah.

• 1:23:17Trevor Noah?

  I can't help but think to myself, is that a possibility, like, ever in our evolution as humans? Because you can go back and read, I mean, like, ancient texts, 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. 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. And it's also a very, a very, um, it's the perfect tool to define where morality lies in a society. You know, you think of like-

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Law, or?

• 1:24:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no, but like, how we view sex. And even beyond the laws around it itself, but the how we view it. You know, you know, you think of colonial writing, that the savages, the way they have sex, and the savage sex, and the- It it's such a powerful tool to define where the norm exists and where the other starts. 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, because I often find that they do a lot of work in defining sex in a way that like mainstream doesn't. You you know what I mean? Like, I remember in and around the Me Too movement, I learned more from the BDSM communities that came up online.

• 1:24:43Trevor Noah?

  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, we have been whipping, we have been. And it's, it was, I was ignorant to it. 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. And I, so I wonder like what you learned about what we could learn by engaging with groups or communities who have generally been pushed out to the fringes.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:25:49Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  I I was really inspired in in doing these interviews by the number of young people I spoke with who were. Interested in activism around sex. 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. 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, it was devastating for her. It was profoundly difficult for her to pick herself up again after that. But she got involved in plebisciter advocacy on campus and became really invested in sex ed. And she got to a point where, you know, she is interested in sending nudes to her now boyfriend.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  And so the answer isn't necessarily, you know, never send nudes again, you've been hurt by it. 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. 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. 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. 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.

• 1:27:20Trevor Noah?

  I don't want to probe into your past, so please 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, 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. 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?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  I think an apology would have actually done a lot.

• 1:27:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  Like, it actually, I wasn't, I wouldn't have really needed, frankly, that much. And I should say that I wasn't raped. 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 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, it was just a different person, they would have wanted more. But I would have felt that if he had acknowledged what had happened as something that had hurt me.

• 1:28:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  And said, I'm sorry that I did that. That would have been enough for me. And you know, this is something that gets talked about in the concept of restorative justice.

• 1:28:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  Which I bring up a little bit in the book, which is that you can have. If you have conversations and create a safe space for conversations, I think people don't necessarily realize that like. You know, there's actually a wide variety of outcomes that some people would accept.

• 1:28:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  That are not just punitive.

• 1:28:39Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  But we don't create the space for those kinds of outcomes. 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.

• 1:28:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, in a, in a world where the law. Has now become responsible for handling all of communities conversations. Like every, every aspect of a, of a conversation that should be held in a community.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:29:02Trevor Noah?

  Everything becomes legal. Do you know what I mean? And it's, that's like one of the, the things. 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.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Trevor Noah?

  Or the value of, do you acknowledge the thing that happened to me? The value of. And because of the business side of it.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Trevor Noah?

  You know, which you talk about all the time. 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.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Punitive.

• 1:29:37Trevor Noah?

  In the 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. So that's like a, it's a, it's a beautiful way to think of it. Thank you for sharing that.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think.

• 1:29:53Speaker 05

  In the, in the most softer side of it, which is the one extreme, which is an emotionally unavailable boyfriend for a woman is, 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

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  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 a wrong place. 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. Men are scared of what they might do because they don't know much. So I think you're right when you're saying it should be all encompassing when it comes to um 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, in how they behave.

• 1:30:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, how they saw the world.

• 1:30:51Speaker 05

  Yes, because at some point we have to admit that that generation also raised well-balanced and well-rounded individuals. 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. So there's no conversation. There's no way, and also there's no um, for males especially, 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 uh protector is. You know, I've had these conversations in South Africa where during GB gen- gender-based violence month, I would say, I hate how.

• 1:31:27Trevor Noah?

  That's where we're against it, by the way.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, that one month.

• 1:31:29Trevor Noah?

  Just, no, but we're against it, just so you know, because you never know.

• 1:31:32Speaker 05

  Late night on the thirty first.

• 1:31:33Trevor Noah?

  You never, you, but you can't just say the month, because you never know if you're for against, against.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  I assumed against, but.

• 1:31:39Trevor Noah?

  You, I'm just letting you know. I don't want you walking away being like in South Africa. They, they celebrate gender-based violence for a month.

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  We don't celebrate it. We highlight it.

• 1:31:48Trevor Noah?

  Against.

• 1:31:48Speaker 05

  Yes, so I, 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.

• 1:31:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  And when they say they wanna take the drive to younger men at school, I'm like, no. You can't au- automatically assume that a young man is going to commit sexual assault against or gender-based violence against a woman. You're not giving them the benefit of the doubt. You're already accusing them before they've gotten their first kiss or their first crush.

• 1:32:16Trevor Noah?

  Fear to your point, something you talk about even on the. You talk about in the book in and around like Roe v Wade. Uh huh. And it it is it is something that has to be, again, we 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 count in all these things. You're in school. Uh huh. The fear is you have sex, you're gonna die. Yeah. Or you're gonna have a sixteen pound baby. These are your options. Yes. 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. Uh huh. You know, it's fear. And then there's another type of fear. If I come forward, I'll be shamed or I I will be, you know, I won't be listened to or this or it'll be a kangaroo call. It becomes a fear. Hmm. And then you come into another situation. I'll be rejected. If you if I say no, it's a fear.

• 1:33:00Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  I just, yeah, I want to be clear also. You know, one in twenty five young, one in twenty five men in the U S has been penetrated against their will. And one in nine has been made to penetrate somebody else against their will.

• 1:33:20Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:33:21Trevor Noah?

  But I'm saying that's that's them like even against their will. I I wonder if that includes? Men who will say, and this is what I mean by the complicated nature of it. Hmm. They may go. Not it not against my will. But I didn't know that I can say no. I I and I think it was.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  Because men are expected to always want sex.

• 1:33:37Trevor Noah?

  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 I don't always want to have sex. And she's like, I mean, that the clearly there's something wrong with me. And then now you're living in a world where? One half of the couples going, there's something wrong with me because men always want sex. Why doesn't he always want sex? Uh huh. And the man's like, ah, men don't always want sex. That's not like a real thing, but now I can't say this to you now.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Or the man is thinking, men always want sex. Why don't I always want sex? What's wrong with me?

• 1:34:07Trevor Noah?

  That's exactly, so when we talk about that fear. You're right. I think of you add another layer to it. Yeah. People go, oh, Gen Z, why are they so afraid of sex? And then you go, yeah.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  Have you seen sex lately?

• 1:34:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and also like look at Roe v Wade. If you told somebody? Hmm. That the actions of your sex. 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. Otherwise, you're a criminal. I can see some people going, ah, then I don't even want to have sex then. You know, and I I'm assuming you you you saw this or you felt this. How much? How much do you think that affected how Gen Z now sees sex in America?

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:34:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:35:07Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:35:28Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:34Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:43Trevor Noah?

  Jeez.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Or the state of politics, I would say, right now is making me a bad person for having sex. And, you know, with Roe v. 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 gonna do? Do I have the money to end this pregnancy? Could we go out of state? Would, what does it mean if I just continue to have this baby? 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.

• 1:37:04Speaker 05

  Knowingly or unknowingly?

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Uh, both. And so this is not just an issue that just affects women. It is something that many of the young men I spoke to were also thinking about and were also wracked with anxiety over.

• 1:37:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've seen how it also, 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? You know, I've seen people who are going, eh, but you know, might not agree about me not wanting to have sex with her or her wanting to do it with me, not, nah, 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. 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?

• 1:37:58Trevor Noah?

  We had a few of those stories. It is actually sad how that happens. We've seen a few of those stories recently in the news. And it is, it is interesting to use the airplane analogy. It's amazing how people can use a few stories to create so much fear. And do you know what I mean? It's like, it's messy and it's complicated. And it's like, I wonder if you came to any, um...

• 1:38:29Trevor Noah?

  I wonder if you came to any

• 1:38:33Trevor Noah?

  light at the end of a tunnel, and not that this is a morbid thing, by the way, you know?

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Trevor Noah?

  But like, listen, like to what Eugene is saying now, I agree with completely. Do you know what I'm saying? Think about like, some of the conversations we've had on this podcast in different episodes.

• 1:38:47Trevor Noah?

  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. They can hurt, women can use a law to hurt men. Men have been using the law in their favor to hurt women for, you know, decades and decades. But where's, 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?

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  And I, I think one of the things that did give me hope was the extent to which young people were trying to do that. And I think because these young people have grown up, seeing Rogan overturn, 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. And that no matter what we do, sex will always have those political dimensions and that political valence. 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?

• 1:40:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  And I think that as much as the political elements of sex can make people anxious, it can also be 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. It's something that I can go out and try to redefine the terms of in school rooms,

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  go out and try to redefine the terms of in school board meetings and in courtrooms and in state legislatures and in Congress. 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.

• 1:41:03Speaker 05

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

• 1:41:08Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:41:09Speaker 05

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

• 1:41:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that, I never thought of it like that.

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  Did I, you see what I did there?

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  You, you won.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  So these things happen often in this podcast. I'll take it to the top, top, top. Then we get stuck, you know?

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Then there's just a moment of silence of reverence.

• 1:41:31Trevor Noah?

  There's a moment of silence.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  The pointedness of your, just that was incredible insight.

• 1:41:37Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:41:42Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 1:41:43Trevor Noah?

  This community service is just, I go, wow.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Again, your philanthropy, it's incredible.

• 1:41:46Trevor Noah?

  We just don't deserve, 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. Carter, we really had fun. This was, this was great. I, I think I appreciate more than anything how nuanced your book is.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Trevor Noah?

  You know, in, in a world where everything is turning into like one thing or another, it's so rare to read an account of just like human complexity. You know, age, gender, legal, parent, child, you, you name it. I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't be seen in this book. And so thank, thank you for coming and chatting to us about it. And, you know, I, I, I hope everyone reads it. And I can't, I can't wait to see what you write about in the next one.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:39Trevor Noah?

  Thank you very much. This was dope. Too much fun.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  Thank you for all the sex puns.

• 1:42:45Trevor Noah?

  You are so good. You made this so much fun. Yeah, man. Thank you very much, for real.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  Of course. Thank you.

• 1:42:50Trevor Noah?

  Geez. That was fun. 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.

• 1:43:17Trevor Noah?

  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 Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Pardue. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

• 1:44:23Speaker 07

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