#66 Dr. Emily Nagoski: Pleasure is the Measure

Sex educator and author Dr. Emily Nagoski demystifies the science of sexuality and shows us how to shed our insecurities, connect more closely with our partner, and define pleasure on our own terms. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Almost none of the sex humans have ever had is reproductive. Even before there was hormonal contraception, there was not a statistically significant relationship between frequency of sex and number of pregnancies.

• 0:12Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  So, almost none of the sex we have is reproductive. Its primary function for us as a species is as a social behavior.

• 0:30Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you master the best of what other people have already figured out. To learn more and stay up to date on new episodes, go to fs.blog/podcast. Farnham Street puts together a weekly newsletter that I think you'll love. It's called Brain Food. It comes out every Sunday. And much like this podcast, it's high signal, timeless, and mind-expanding. Read what you're missing at fs.blog/newsletter. Today, I'm speaking with Emily Nagoski, sex therapist and author of the amazing book, Come As You Are. Emily, as you'll discover, is nothing short of incredible.

• 1:14Shane Parrish?

  And as you might have guessed, we're going to talk about sex. This is a different type of conversation than we've ever had on The Knowledge Project before. I'm going to warn you in advance that the language and subject matter of this episode is not appropriate for all ages. If you're easily offended or don't want to hear about sex, turn this off right now. If you have kids in the car or nearby, I suggest you pre-screen this episode before letting them listen. If you're using speakers in an office or room where other people might hear you, you're going to want to put headphones on. Don't say I didn't warn you. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:59Shane Parrish?

  Emily, I'm so glad to get to speak to you today about sex.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Me too.

• 2:04Shane Parrish?

  What's the difference between the vulva and the vagina?

• 2:08Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you asked that question. So the vulva is the technical term for the external package of the genitalia that on the day a baby is born, if people see it, they go, "It's a girl!" It doesn't necessarily mean that that person is going to grow up and identify as a girl, but it's very likely that on that day, people are going to see that package of genitalia and start raising that person as a girl. The vagina is the internal reproductive canal. It's where menstrual blood in babies come out, and if they're into it, penises, fingers, and toys can go in.

• 2:39Shane Parrish?

  In your book, Come As You Are, you talk about how males and females have more similar parts than we're used to thinking about. Can you expand on that?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Sure. The thing I say over and over, I think in literally every chapter of the book, is that we're all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. And one of the reasons why, for example, I think it's so important to differentiate between the vagina and the vulva is because the names we call things shapes how we think about it, right? So if I was trying to explain to you what your face was and how your face works, and I was using the word nose, you'd get really confused because your nose is one prominent feature, but they'd be missing a whole lot of other parts, right? So when we use the language of vagina, we're talking about one feature and ignoring a

• 3:34Speaker 00

  whole bunch of other important parts, like the clitoris. So the clitoris is the biological homologue, coming from the original, the same origin. Same origin, not same function, that's an important difference. So the clitoris is the biological homologue of the penis. But more crucially, the external part of the clitoris, the glans clitoris, glans is the Latin word for acorn. No, I don't know why. Why that's the word they... I guess. But it's the homolog for the gland's penis, which is just the head of the penis. Is the head of the penis all there is to the penis?

• 4:12Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  No, there's all this other stuff going on. There's a shaft that's made of three spongy chambers, and there's all this skin that covers it. Same goes for the clitoris. There's all this skin that covers the head, and there's three spongy chambers that extend deep into the tissue. And in fact, for the penis, you can actually push down along the shaft, and you'll feel how the shaft extends deep into the body. There's much more going on with the penis than just the part we can see on the outside. Same goes for the clitoris. There's like all this stuff going on deep inside. In fact, the spongy bodies of the internal structures of the clitoris extend all the way down to the mouth of the vagina. So that we think, for some people,

• 4:56Speaker 00

  vaginal penetration actually results in stimulation of these internal parts of the clitoris. It's only when we begin thinking about our anatomy in these homologous terms that we really recognize the complexities of all of our different parts. What it also means is we're all made of the same parts organized in different ways. One other example of homology is the scrotum. Next time you're up close in person with a scrotum, you'll see a seam that goes down the center. It's called a scrotal rafe. That is where that person's scrotum knits together. But if things had been a little different in the chromosomal or hormonal environment, that person's body would have developed labia instead.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  In a fetus, that's actually called the labioscutal tissue. It's all the same parts, just organized in different ways. So when we look at the "it's a girl" package and the "it's a boy" package, we can see that it really is all the same parts organized in different ways. But also, if we look at several different "it's a girl" packages and several different "it's a boy" packages, they are also all the same parts, just organized in different ways. And there's nothing wrong or broken about any of them. As long as there's no unwanted pain or infection, they're all just different variations on the way bodies can look.

• 6:16Shane Parrish?

  One of the reasons I dove right into this subject is we seem, we were talking about this a little bit beforehand. We seem uncomfortable to talk about sex.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:24Shane Parrish?

  When I asked people what questions they had about sex, I made it anonymous so that we would get a whole bunch of questions. People could upvote them. And I think we got better questions that way. But why do you think we're so uncomfortable talking about sex?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  There's, I mean, there's so many reasons.

• 6:43Shane Parrish?

  Like, I dove into it, so I wasn't even thinking about it. And then that way, we can like pull it.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  And then I'm over here making hand gestures and talking about penises and vulvas and vaginas and clitorises and vaginal penetration. And, oh, let's talk about fluids, too.

• 6:55Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  But people have this sort of like, uh, squick reaction. Sex educators use this term squick. It refers to the discomfort, the withdrawal, the shock and disgust that we feel. It comes from spending your entire life being raised with these weirdly mixed messages that sex is a dangerous and disgusting source of everlasting shame. And if you're not really good at it, no one's ever gonna love you. How do you make those two things work? They both make sex a source of fear and shame and need you to hide it. So Jonathan Haidt's research on the moral foundations offers, one of the moral foundations is the shame disgust withdrawal,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  which is about purity and sanctity. This foundation is the one that I think is most involved in our reaction to sexuality and our fear of talking about it. It's sort of everything from like, take off your shoes when you come inside because you're bringing dirt from outside, to like, I'm only gonna eat clean. The like purity of our food, as well as cleanliness and washing our hands, but also sex. Basically, the body is base and disgusting. It needs to be avoided. We need to rise above it into the pure sanctified realm of. The spirit, basically. The purity sanctity foundation isn't just at work in sexuality, but I think it is the most powerful explanation

• 8:21Speaker 00

  for why we have moral reactions to just a conversation about genitals.

• 8:28Shane Parrish?

  How do we become more comfortable talking about sex? Not only, like specifically talking about sex, maybe as a society, and then narrowing down to a relationship and talking about sex with your partner and being comfortable approaching that conversation?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  There's actually an evidence-based answer for that. You start early. You repeat it over and over again. And you begin with simple stuff about relationships and, you know, like body part names. Okay, I'm going to tell you two contrasting stories. One is of a woman who read Come As You Are, and then she tweeted me that she then watched her adult brother change his baby daughter's diaper. And when the little baby daughter was all clean, he went to get the diaper, and she reached down and touched her own genitals. And dad goes, uh-uh, don't touch that.

• 9:21Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  So what's she learning in that moment? That that part of her body doesn't belong to her to touch and do with as she pleases? What would he have said if his baby had a penis instead? What would he have said if his baby had touched her feet instead? I mean, we get like so excited when our babies touch their feet, right? They're, oh, you've got your feet. Oh, that's so cute. But when this little girl found her clitoris, dad was just like, eh, no. She's not going to remember this moment, but it will accumulate with countless other similar moments so that by the time she gets to adolescence, she doesn't know where she got this idea. But the idea of her own genitals disgusts and horrifies her, and she feels like it doesn't even belong to her.

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Versus, I was giving a workshop for a group of therapists on a college campus. And afterwards, one of the therapists told me that her daughter, who was at the time two years old, at the time of the story, was bouncing on one of those bouncy balls. And she goes, mommy, this feels really good. And mom says, yes, honey, that's your clitoris. And the little girl goes, my clitoris is my favorite. Right?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  So she's probably not going to remember that moment, but it will accumulate with countless other moments and shape how she feels about her own parts. So there's these two contrasting stories about how these two girls are going to grow up in their relationship with their own bodies. But then there's also how people feel when they hear me tell those stories. There are a lot of people who agree that it's nice that that little girl learned that her clitoris was a part of her body and that it was cute that she liked it, but they also have this unarticulable kind of like, no, there's got to be something dangerous and I don't know what's dangerous and wrong about it, but it feels somehow dangerous and wrong for a two-year-old to say her clitoris is her favorite.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  And this is a phenomenon called moral dumbfounding, where you can't describe the ways that it's harmful or why it's wrong. You just have this sense that there's got to be something wrong with that.

• 11:33Shane Parrish?

  I think the reaction of the parents is key, right? I know the first time my mother ever caught me, the only time my mother ever caught me masturbating, I felt so much shame based on her response. And I wonder how that sort of like plays out through life.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's

• 11:48Shane Parrish?

  Because then it became hidden and it became something to do when nobody can catch you. And it sort of, it didn't stop me from masturbating. It stopped me from, or it made me more careful and more thoughtful about my approaches.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Made you hide it.

• 12:01Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, it made me hide it.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was in the car with my mother. We were driving home from the library, so we must have just been at the library and I must have seen it in a book. And I asked my mom, what's vagina? And I don't remember the word she said, but I remember the flash of emotion that she experienced sitting there driving the car. So what I learned in that moment was whatever this vagina thing was, it was scary and shameful and I should definitely never ask about it ever again. So I went home and looked it up in the medical encyclopedias that were in our house, which is how I got most of my sex education as a child. Yeah, when it comes to what families can do to promote sex positivity, making sure your kids have a happier, healthier sex life than you have,

• 12:47Speaker 00

  it has everything to do with that emotional reaction. Like, prepare yourself for using these words. The more comfortable and normal you can be when these words get spoken, elbow, fingers, vagina, penis, scrotum, toes, ankles, patellar tendon, like, whatever, they're all just parts. And when you can react to them neutrally, what that communicates to your kid is, I'm safe to talk to you about these things. It's not dangerous or scary. And if you want to talk about stuff, I am an okay person to talk to.

• 13:25Shane Parrish?

  One of the things that you're gonna find listening to this conversation is, when I was thinking about how to architect it, like, what would be the overall story? Everything in sex is connected. And so it's actually hard to sort of like come up with-

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Try writing a book about it.

• 13:38Shane Parrish?

  A thematic approach. So, so we're gonna appear all over the place, but it all relates to sex. And since we're on the topic, I sort of wanted to like do media messages, but we're on the topic of messages for sex. And one of the messages that you acquire is the message your parents give you.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:55Shane Parrish?

  And I'm curious, like, maybe two or three separate scenarios. Like, how do you talk to kids in the, you know, seven to 10 range about sex? How do you talk to kids 10 to 13, and then maybe 13 above? And what do those conversations look like?

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:10Shane Parrish?

  How should you approach them?

• 14:11Speaker 00

  That's a great question that I can't answer.

• 14:13Shane Parrish?

  No idea, okay.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, I work with adults.

• 14:15Shane Parrish?

  Yes, of course.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  So like, I just have the generic, like, the most important thing when it comes to parents talking to their kids is that the parents address their own shit.

• 14:26Shane Parrish?

  What do you mean by that? Address your own stuff?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  If you're listening to us using all these genital words and you're like, This is fine. This is fine. Yeah, like, address that stuff.

• 14:38Shane Parrish?

  Everybody listening to this right now in their cars, like, squirming.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, no, it's totally.

• 14:45Shane Parrish?

  Nobody can hear what I'm listening to.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Right, you're sitting on the bus with your headphones, looking at people like, do they know? Oh, my god. That is the thing to work on, not just that sort of squick, gross-out thing, but also cultural messages, particularly around gender roles, consent, and bodily autonomy. All of us have absorbed these patriarchal narratives about, like, women's bodies don't actually belong to them. They're in the public domain for men to trade and barter, to put it in its darkest, darkest terms. The language I've been using for this lately is a phenomenon that we call human giver syndrome. This comes from a spectacular book called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,

• 15:30Speaker 00

  by a moral philosopher named Kate Mann. In it, she posits a world where there are two types of humans. There are the human beings who have a moral obligation to be their full humanity, their human beings. And then there's the human givers, who have a moral obligation to give their full humanity to the beings, to give their time, attention, energy, affection, patience, kindness, bodies. Every resource they have is the rightful property of whatever being needs it, so that the being can achieve their full potential. Guess which one the women are?

• 16:12Speaker 00

  And of course, that's a cartoon version of it. I'm married to a man who is a giver. It's not actually as simple as just women are the givers, men are the beings. But the cultural script is very much, let's get two people together. And if one of them is a human being and the other one's a human giver... What are they gonna do? They're gonna do what the human being wants to do because they have both been taught that the human being is the one who has the right to take whatever he wants. And his pleasure is what matters. And the giver's job is just to give the pleasure and do whatever it takes. So as much as I love like a yes means yes conversation about sex.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Like, for example, the, um, do you remember the tea blog post and video about how consent is like tea? Like, if you, if you, oh, it's great. You should link it and watch the video. It's a like really beautiful sort of consent 101. We'll find this, yeah. Like you would, if you offer somebody tea and they say no, you don't force them to drink tea, right? And if you offer them tea and they say, sure. And then in the time it takes you to make the tea and bring it back, they change their mind and are like, actually, no tea. You don't force them to drink tea. And if they have tea with you today, that doesn't mean they necessarily are required to have tea with you tomorrow. Or that they wanna like wake up the next morning with you pouring tea down their throat. And if they're unconscious, they definitely don't want tea, right?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  It's very simple, like we can all understand. But with sex, it's different because if person A is offering tea to person B, person A is a human being and person B is a human giver. Person B receives the request, hey, I would like to give you some tea. Would you like to have some tea? Person B's role as a human giver is to make sure the human being is satisfied. And so they sort of feel morally obliged to say yes. Not just that, but suppose they're sitting there thinking, okay, so what are some of the things I want here? I want, um, not to hurt this person's feelings. I want to tell my friends I had tea with this person.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  I wanna see what this person's teacups are like. I want, uh, the milk and the sugar. But I don't want any actual tea. So what does the person say? Do you say yes? And what would it take for that person to say, you know what, no tea for me, but what I would really love is a cup full of milk and sugar and to watch you drink tea? How would that be?

• 18:44Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Only if this person, if this human giver is freed up from their role as a giver of satisfying needs and not being afraid of disappointing the other person and hurting their feelings and not giving them what they want. Only when they're free of that role are they truly free to say, here's what I would like. How, what do you think about that? In her very dark but important book, Girls and Sex, Peggy Orenstein tells the story of a teenage girl who gave a boy a blowjob because he wanted to have sex and a blowjob was the way she figured she could get him out of her house without it escalating.

• 19:21Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's sad.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's sad. So that's human giver syndrome. And part of what the shit that parents need to like get themselves through is renegotiating these gendered messages around bodily autonomy and what it truly means to give consent and what a woman's role is in the world, not just sexually, but overall.

• 19:45Shane Parrish?

  That works both ways, too. I mean, and less common for sure. Like, guys need to be able to feel comfortable saying no and in a way that, we both need to feel comfortable saying no in a way that doesn't sort of, not disrespect, but doesn't make the other person feel like you're not interested in something. It's just not comfortable. And how do you do that? Because I remember, you know, times in my own life where, you know, somebody said no and like I was brought up with no means no, so you stop right away. And I've also been in the situation where I've said no and it makes somebody feel like you're not interested in them. And it goes through all of these sort of weird thoughts and feelings that people respond to. And they often respond in private.

• 20:30Shane Parrish?

  Like, no is interesting, but no without a conversation might be more devastating because then somebody walks away feeling.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:38Shane Parrish?

  How do you like, how do you have that conversation?

• 20:40Speaker 00

  Because you inevitably fill in the gap with all of your worst fears.

• 20:44Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it can actually be worse for men and boys in some ways because they're taught that if there's any time that they don't want the sex or they don't like the sex, that they're actually a failure. They're supposed to be like, ready to go all the time. They're supposed to want sex all the time. They're supposed to like all the sex that is available to them. And to say no is not simply, as it is for girls, to like, disappoint the other person and hurt their feelings. It is to fail as a man to, it's a measure of your worth as a human on earth, to like, put your penises in any vagina that you can get it into. And to have an opportunity to do something sexual and not want to, like,

• 21:28Speaker 00

  there's all these feelings of self doubt, as well as the relationship with the other human being. And that's a conversation that if you're two teenagers, trying to have that conversation, that's never gonna be articulated.

• 21:41Shane Parrish?

  Here's a crazy, interesting story from high school that's true. I was dating a woman. I refused to have sex because we didn't have a condom. We didn't have a conversation about it. She ended up breaking up with me the next day because she felt like I wasn't interested.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  We rejected her.

• 21:58Shane Parrish?

  And she felt rejected, which wasn't the case at all. And so this misunderstanding, 13 sort of like, weeks later, she comes to school pregnant. Everybody thinks it's mine because we were dating. I know it's not mine because we've never actually had sex. And when I'm starting to tell my friends that, the message that I was getting was like, what do you mean? You didn't have, like, you could have and you didn't?

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:25Shane Parrish?

  And it was this weird sort of like...

• 22:27Speaker 00

  I was responsible. I did what I was supposed to do.

• 22:30Shane Parrish?

  But, but, so that was my pressure. And I mean, like, I would imagine girls have totally different pressure around sex that I can't even begin to understand as you, especially in the late teens, early adult years. I mean, can you expand on some of those pressures?

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, the thing that girls deal with is that no matter what they're doing, they're doing it wrong. We were talking about like the different messages, like there's the moral messages we get from the religious institutions. And even if you don't personally believe them, there they are. Abstinence only until marriage, abstinence referring explicitly to penis and vagina sex, because that's what sex is. And people with penises and people in vaginas is what marriage is. Like, that's it. The wonderful thing about the moral messages is that they're like, sex is a dangerous and disgusting, shameful sin that you should only share with someone you very much love. Okay, okay, good.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  The moral messages are very much about purity and protecting yourself. Do you know the used tape analogy? Abstinence only sex educators in the United States will go into high schools and they'll roll a piece of tape with the sticky part on the outside and they'll pass it around and have everybody stick it one time on their desk and pass it to the next person and stick it to the desk of the next person and pass it. And then when they get back, see, this is what happens when you have sex multiple times, is you're like, not a sticky piece of tape anymore. And who would want to be with this? Like, you can use up and like, dirty, sully, permanently damage your sexuality by having sex with anybody who isn't like the person that you're going to be having sex with. So that's the moral

• 24:09Speaker 00

  message. Then there's the media message, which is exactly the opposite, that you should be having 74 different kinds of orgasms, you should be able to deep throat, you should be having sex on a very regular basis, you should want sex all the time, ladies, and you should be able to perform sex. This is the one that was really salient to me in my adolescence. I learned that men really like it when women enjoy sex. So you should act like you enjoy sex. Pretend to be a giver. It was absolutely to be a giver. So that he can be satisfied, I should be really confident.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Because men really love confidence in women. And so I learned to perform pleasure without learning how to experience pleasure. And then there's the medical messages, which especially you get these when you get the kind of education that's about like contraception and STIs. And you see the pictures of genitals with enormous warts on them, which isn't something that physicians see almost ever. And you get taught that there's a sexual response cycle that starts with the desire, goes to arousal, plateau, orgasm, in that order every time. And also, healthy couples have simultaneous orgasms during penis and vagina sex.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  And there's a sort of like structure of how you're doing it medically correctly. And those are all a set of rules to follow. And unfortunately, a lot of the science for a very long time deeply misunderstood how sexuality actually works. Only in the last 20, maybe 30 years, has the science been drawing a more accurate and representative picture of how sexuality actually works physiologically and relationally. For a lo- for a long time, up until early in the 20th century, doctors were pretty sure that a woman having an orgasm was how she got pregnant. Doctors have been wrong for a really long time.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  And yet, these medical messages are there, and we assume that they're right because they are the medical messages. So it's three different, competing, contradictory sets of messages. The whore Madonna contrast, that is usually how we talk about it, really doesn't cover the complexity of the contradictory messages. But whatever we're doing, we're doing it wrong. Our bodies are the wrong shape and size. Our experience of desire is wrong. We're not supposed to want sex at all. That's only for sluts. We're supposed to want sex all the time, or else you're a prude.

• 26:51Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned Deep Throat, so this is like a great segue into porn.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Great.

• 26:55Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about porn and the effect it's having. On our perceptions of the other gender. And I presume it's predominantly males who are changing their perception of what females should be based on porn, or what females should do based on porn.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  There's not a lot of research on this question because the people for whom this is true are still really young. Internet access to porn was started 1998, say.

• 27:27Shane Parrish?

  Okay, it's sort of my generation, which would be like 40-ish now.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  Well, 30.

• 27:32Shane Parrish?

  That would be high school for me is like 1998.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I graduated from college in 98. And I think of people 10 years younger than me as being the ones who, so if they're like 12 in 1998, and they're like tits on the internet.

• 27:49Shane Parrish?

  And then.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Boom, they get something I never could have gotten when I was 12 years old in 1989. So we don't know yet what impact it has had. I do know that porn is really bad sex education. It's like, this is my standard analogy, learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive watching NASCAR. Those are professionals on a closed course with a pit crew. Do not attempt. Like, it doesn't show how sex actually works. And it's certainly mainstream porn in particular, like the kind you can get for free, reinforces a whole lot of norms about what people's bodies look like and how they behave and what pleasure looks like.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  They mostly show things that look interesting on camera, like the angles of people's legs spread really wide. And like, it's just so they can get the camera up in there and give the, what I call meat and potatoes shot. But when you're a 12-year-old, you're not like a, you know, media literate, really savvy viewer, thinking about like what made them choose that position in that shot.

• 28:55Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  You're just like, that is a penis going directly into the vagina.

• 28:59Shane Parrish?

  This is what it should look like.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  And my body is exploding.

• 29:01Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  And you're like, I guess that's what sex is.

• 29:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  And the same goes for girls. Girls are learning how to perform. Men are also learning how to perform. Boys are learning like what they're supposed to do.

• 29:13Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  And that's the.

• 29:15Shane Parrish?

  Or how they're supposed to treat women.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what people's bodies are supposed to look like, including boys learning what their penises are supposed to look like.

• 29:23Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  God. So it's not good sex education. It's not. Harmful in a direct way? I think most of the harm from mainstream porn is actually done not to the people who watch it, but to performers who are coerced or not given free consent to make choices about what they do or don't do. There's a lot of really bad stuff that happens in the production of porn. A very small proportion of people, both men and women, boys and girls, find themselves using porn as a, the technical term is a maladaptive strategy to manage negative affect.

• 30:01Shane Parrish?

  What does that mean?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  So basically, if you're stressed, depressed, anxious, lonely, or experiencing repressed rage, we've all got it. And instead of coping with your feelings, you go masturbate.

• 30:13Shane Parrish?

  Or turning to your partner to build a connection.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  For love and support. Yeah, exactly. If you turn not to your partner, but away from your partner and just watch porn and numb out from those feelings instead, that's where you can develop an unhealthy relationship with porn. Many people describe this as porn addiction. I'm not persuaded one way or the other about whether it technically is that, but mostly porn is moderately benign, but it's really bad sex education. I think that's the most common negative impact.

• 30:46Shane Parrish?

  Would not have a huge impact on your relationship, too? If you're stressed, you come home and rather than turn to your partner and engage in something that bonds you together, be it sex or conversation, you turn away and you go in private and you, I don't even know what the term is for it, like you postpone feeling, like you're postponing dealing with these issues by distracting yourself. But you're also, at the same time, now you're alienating your partner from this, possibly lowering your sex drive for interactions with them. And Weakening your connection or your bond with them.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the partner's feelings about it are the place where this is different from all the other ways that we numb out and avoid coping with our feelings. Because there's lots of things we do in place of this, right? With varying degrees of health consequences. People eat to numb out, people work to numb out, people exercise to avoid coping with their feelings, which might be like the least dangerous but can still be done in a maladaptive way. People just watch TV. People read to avoid their feelings. Like, there's all kinds of things that we do. But because a partner's likely to have an opinion and an emotional reaction to the fact that what this person is choosing instead of me is that,

• 32:07Speaker 00

  that can get really destructive. And the fact that you're in a dynamic where you're not talking makes it not too promising that you're going to have a conversation about how you both feel about the porn use.

• 32:19Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Therapy. That's what therapy is for.

• 32:24Shane Parrish?

  While we're on cultural messages still, talk to me about monogamy, the rise of open relationships. If there's any sort of evidence that those create healthier relationships or if it's just the opposite, or they tend to cause anxiety in a partner? Or just go.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, there isn't any evidence one way about them being better or worse. They're just a different relationship structure. They work really well for some people. My favorite story about non-monogamy is a friend of mine who was non-monogamous all his 40-plus-year marriage. And his wife.

• 33:05Shane Parrish?

  With his partner's consent or without?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  With.

• 33:07Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Yes, this is an open, polyamorous couple. They both have sex outside the marriage. They have relationships, full-blown relationships, outside the marriage for decades. She is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's and dies very slowly and painfully. And. I can't imagine how my friend, the husband, would have gotten through supporting his wife through her death without his other lovers.

• 33:37Shane Parrish?

  Oh.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  He needed that whole community around him and with him and loving him as intensely as a romantic partner with the physical affection and everything.

• 33:48Shane Parrish?

  That surprises me. Maybe, does that indicate that I believe in, strongly believe in monogamy? That I like that, that response is...

• 33:56Speaker 00

  It indicates that you've spent your whole life being surrounded by messages about monogamy, probably.

• 34:00Shane Parrish?

  Probably, yeah.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Usually when I'm asked this question, like at the end of a talk, it's in the context of, "Our sex life is not going great. We're not connecting sexually with each other sort of at all. Should we just go have sex with other people?" Like, "Everything else in our relationship is fine. I had this one, my, two of my friends, two of my best friends, like, took me out for drinks. And we're like, everything else in our relationship is great. We're great co-parents. We're like, work at blah, blah, blah. Everything's great. It's just our sex life. We can't make that work." And I like, gave them all the advice that there is to give, and they got divorced three years later. And we're like, only then could be like, "Yeah, it wasn't just the sex. It's rarely just the sex. There's almost always some other underlying something or other."

• 34:46Shane Parrish?

  Let's pause that and come back to like, the relationship context of it.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  So here's the thing. If you're interested in opening up your relationship, think about it this way. When you're just by yourself, there's you and your feelings, and there's how you feel about your feelings. When there's two people, there's you and your feelings and how you feel about your feelings. There's person B, their feelings and how they feel about their feelings. And then there's how person A feels about person B's feelings and how person B feels about person A's feelings. And person C, with their feelings and how they feel about their feelings. Now there's person A, their feelings and their feelings about their feelings. Person B, their feelings about their feelings and their feelings. Person A's feelings about person B's feelings, person B's feelings about person A's feelings, person A's feelings about person C's feelings, person B's feelings about person C's feelings, person C's feelings about person A's feelings,

• 35:34Speaker 00

  person C's feelings about person B's feelings, person A's feelings about person C's feelings, about person's B feelings, person's B feelings about person's A's feelings, about person B's feelings. You get where I'm going?

• 35:43Shane Parrish?

  I see, yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Like, it's exponentially more complicated. What it requires is a whole lot of planned calendar time for sitting around talking about your feelings. If you're not already good at calendar management and talking about your feelings, open relationships might not be for you. You know, the sort of idea of like, let's have a baby, that's how to save our relationship? Adding another person never makes things easier.

• 36:12Shane Parrish?

  What are the signs in your experience that an open relationship is going to sabotage things versus an open relationship might help things?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  What are the signs? That's a really good question. When it works well is when people go into it with a profound degree of love and trust. Trust in particular is really essential. Sue Johnson, the relationship researcher who developed emotionally focused therapy, I love her a lot.

• 36:42Shane Parrish?

  It's funny, I was with her last week and she told me she loved you a lot.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did love you. So she defines trust. She breaks it down to, are you there for me? Are you available? And I forget what they are in the E V stand for, but are you there for me is trust. So if you're good at being emotionally present with your partner, then awesome. If you can expand that to other people, then that's really promising. If you're good at staying over your own emotional center of gravity, so like when your partner is out with somebody else and you know they're out with somebody else and you're experiencing all kinds of feelings. I had some clients, my master's degree is in counseling. I trained as a sex therapist, ended up not becoming a sex therapist

• 37:29Speaker 00

  because that's just not what I'm good at. I'm an educator. But I had a client, a gay man, who was in an open relationship and he was really struggling with his jealousy. His partner wasn't even in a sexual relationship with the people that he was worried about. But

• 37:48Speaker 00

  My client was a doctoral student in French literature and he would sit on his porch chain, smoking cigarettes in the rain, imagining all the terrible scenarios of like, what's gonna happen basically is my partner's gonna realize that everyone else in the world is a better romantic partner than I am and he's going to leave me when he recognizes that. So

• 38:09Shane Parrish?

  It's anxiety.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  It had everything to do with his own self doubt, with his inability to cope with his insecurities about himself.

• 38:17Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Is what it came down to. Trust really, when it's stressed in a relationship, it comes down either to like, I don't trust that I'm a good enough person for my partner to stay with, or I don't trust that my partner is trustworthy.

• 38:32Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  And trust is gonna get challenged and you have to like, meet your commitments. This is why calendar management is so important. You gotta show up when you say you were gonna show up. If you said 6:30, show up at 6:30 or text and say, I'm gonna be 15 minutes late, cuz that's how you establish trust in a relationship where it's really important that you know your partner's gonna be there for you when you need them.

• 38:54Shane Parrish?

  And that's independent of multiple partners. That's just in general.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but when you open it up to other partners, it becomes, you're like, you have expanded the space where trust is crucial.

• 39:06Shane Parrish?

  The tolerance first.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  That person's gonna go like, put their body and potentially their fluids in contact with someone else's bodily, body and fluids, and then they're gonna come home and bring those body and fluids back into the house. And you need to trust that your partner has done everything that you would want them to do to protect you and your relationship. And again, I've seen it work beautifully and powerfully and it can be extraordinary. And no relationships are easy. Relationships are hard. You get confronted with all the shit from your family of origin. John Gottman uses the phrase enduring vulnerabilities. When you get stressed, when stress, when trust is challenged in a relationship, people

• 39:52Speaker 00

  often have this one script they go back to over and over. And I can tell that I'm stressed or that we're just having generic conflict in the relationship, when I go to, I need more help. I just need more help. Why can't I, why do I have to do everything myself?

• 40:07Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  I need more help. And the fact that I can recognize it, like I hear the script coming out of my mouth and I'm like, oh, wait, that's my mother.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  That's not this relationship. That's just me and my bullshit.

• 40:25Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  And that happens to us whether our relationship is monogamous or open.

• 40:30Shane Parrish?

  Right. Last sort of thing I want to touch on, messages for sex, before we do a deep dive.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  How are you gonna put that noise in the transcript?

• 40:38Shane Parrish?

  Oh, my God. I already feel sorry for the transcriber because you were like, person A talks to person B. And I was like, oh, man, they're gonna have a field day with that.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 40:47Shane Parrish?

  No, it's great. We're given different messages about, actually, we're given a cultural distinction. And maybe I'm just giving my cultural distinction here, but like, I assume we're given a cultural distinction between making love, having sex, and fucking. Can you either tell me I'm like completely off on that or those things exist and how are they separate? And what's the difference?

• 41:11Speaker 00

  I mean, it seems to me like that definitely is a conversation that they had on Sex in the City.

• 41:17Shane Parrish?

  I've never watched Sex in the City, so I definitely did not get it from there.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  I've seen like two episodes and I was like, okay. But it's a thing that I feel like people talk about. I have read like no academic article breaking down making love, having sex and fucking. Oh, it was in the movie Kids from like 1995, I think.

• 41:37Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Where they're talking about like, I'm sex, whereas fucking is like really energetic and passionate, but not like emotionally connected. Again, Sue Johnson breaks it down in a different way. She has solace sex and separate sex and three different things that start with S. So here's a thing I've learned since I wrote Come As You Are. People believe you more when the things you say rhyme.

• 42:01Shane Parrish?

  Makes sense.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  They remember it better and they believe you more. So I made it rhyme. Ready?

• 42:05Shane Parrish?

  Yes.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  There's a lot of different ways about breaking down the different kinds of sex we have. Pleasure is the measure.

• 42:12Shane Parrish?

  I like it.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. It's not about how often you do it, who you do it with, what room you do it in, what positions, how many orgasms you have. It's whether or not you like the sex you are having. So if you like, whatever counts as fucking for you. Do you?

• 42:30Shane Parrish?

  Those are our sort of like artificial distinctions on the same sort of

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:34Shane Parrish?

  biological behavior.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  It's this, it's not, well, I mean, like, so then we need to figure out what counts as biological versus what's some other level of analysis, because in the technical sense, the soulful emotional connection implied by making love, that's part of the biological power of sex, is it's a bonding, socially connecting behavior. Almost none of the sex humans have ever had is reproductive. Even before there was hormonal contraception, there was not a statistically significant relationship between frequency of sex and number of pregnancies.

• 43:13Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  So almost none of the sex we have is reproductive. Its primary function for us as a species is as a social behavior. So that one specific kind of social behavior of making love, of bonding a pair of people together who intend to like stay and maintain that bond over the long term, that attachment behavior is biological. There's hormones involved and like chemical changes. It's biological, but it's also social. And it requires a particular mindset where you go into it with a bunch of things turned off, a bunch of cultural scripts in particular turned off,

• 43:56Speaker 00

  that this is a sex about performance, that this is sex about reproduction, that this is sex that's just about like a notch on a, do people use that term still? Notch on the headboard?

• 44:08Shane Parrish?

  Uh, I, I don't know.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Well.

• 44:10Shane Parrish?

  I know what you mean when you say it, so maybe, yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  So you come into it being like, this is an experience that's about me connecting with this other human being who matters a lot to me. And it's about the fact that this person matters so much to me. That's what I think is implied by making love. And it's totally possible to have sex in the absence of that. It is totally possible to just like, put your body parts together in a noisy, energetic, athletic way, which I think is what is meant by fucking. And I think having sex is, uh, putting your parts together in like a lazy kind of way. Like you're just, you're just like, here, this is sort of like bare minimum.

• 44:55Shane Parrish?

  Here's my penis. Go.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  See, that's the thing is I was thinking, here is my vagina.

• 45:01Shane Parrish?

  Exactly. Same thing. Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  And I was gonna say, do you? But I guess what I mean is do me? Go to town, buddy.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  How's that for a come on?

• 45:10Shane Parrish?

  Get it over with.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Hopefully not get it over with.

• 45:14Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about the role of sex in a relationship. Sex, monogamous relationship, husband, wife, male, male, male or female, female.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  People vary. Not only do people vary from each other and couples vary from each other, but also people change across time and relationships change across time.

• 45:34Shane Parrish?

  Tell me about some of the common ways that people, the role of sex in relationships.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:39Shane Parrish?

  And maybe, and then talk to me about how they change over time.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  So here's a sort of standard narrative is that early on in the hot and heavy fallen in love, there's a greater frequency of sex, a greater intensity of sexual experience where you're like bonding together and building the foundation of what it's eventually going to grow into. It feels a very high desire, high intensity of pleasure, hopefully. And you're often using sex as a way to repair any potential damage to the bond, like if you have a fight or if one of the partners goes away for a while, you come back together in a sexual way for sure. So that's a sort of early in the relationship. And then you like get together and you realize this person, your plan is for them to be there forever.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  And it's really easy at that point for sex to drop away from your list of priorities in life because you've got a lot of other stuff to do. Among the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades, this is the talk I'm giving tomorrow. Among the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection over multiple decades, they have two characteristics in common. Those characteristics are not that they have sex very frequently. Almost no one has sex very frequently because, you know, we're busy. These are not necessarily couples who have wild adventurous sex. This is one of my favorite studies. Just a couple of years ago, a study found that the best predictor of sex and relationship satisfaction was not how often a couple had sex or even like what orgasms they have, but whether or not they cuddled after sex.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  And these are not necessarily couples that like constantly can't wait to get their hands on each other. Sometimes they are. From Come As You Are, you know, the difference between spontaneous desire, which just seems to emerge out of the blue. Erica Mowen, the cartoonist who illustrated Come As You Are, draws spontaneous desire as a lightning bolt to the genitals. Kaboom! You just want it. Yeah. Versus responsive desire, which emerges in response to pleasure. So in a long-term relationship, what this often looks like is like you got the childcare and you put the last load of laundry in the dryer and so you tromp up the stairs because it's Saturday at 3 o'clock. Like you said, you and me in the red underwear. Let's do this

• 47:55Speaker 00

  thing. And so you put your body in the bed and you let your skin, touch your partner's skin, and your body goes, oh, right. I like this. I like this person. That's responsive desire. And spontaneous and responsive desire are both normal, healthy ways to experience desire. But responsive desire is more typical of that like later in the relationship sort of experience. The couples who sustain a strong sexual connection, the two things they do have in common, one, they are friends. They have a strong friendship with trust at the foundation of their relationship. There it is again, trust. And two, they prioritize sex. They decide. They choose it. They believe that it matters for the quality of their

• 48:40Speaker 00

  relationship, that they set aside all the other stuff they could doing, that the childcare that they need to be doing and the jobs they need to go to and other family members and friends and God forbid, they just want to watch Game of Thrones, right? They cordon off time just to spend doing this, frankly, sort of strange thing that we humans do of like rolling our bodies around and combining our fluids and like breathing heavily and like if you're, somebody walked in and didn't know what it was, they might be worried about you because of your facial expression. Those are the couples who sustain a strong sexual connection. I know this isn't the story we're usually told about what like satisfying sex life in the long term looks like. We're told we need to like spice it up and

• 49:26Speaker 00

  If you like to spice it up, go for it. Novelty can be a great way to like, keep the wheels spinning. But ultimately, what matters? That engagement with sexual novelty, like porn and roleplay and toys, those things are great if you like them. But the choice to engage with them in a positive way is itself prioritizing sex. Deciding that it matters enough for your life to spend your money and your time collecting those things and participating in those things.

• 49:58Shane Parrish?

  Sex seems to...

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Oh, I want to add one more thing.

• 50:01Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, go.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  If us people have kids, it is normal. Early in the child experience, for sex to disappear from a relationship for any number of reasons, not least being that your sleep is going to be deeply fucked up. And we know that sleep is actually a predictor of frequency and quality of sex. There was one study from, oh, 2015, that showed that adding one extra hour of sleep increased the chances of having sex the next night by 10%.

• 50:34Shane Parrish?

  So, everybody out there who wants to get some, get some sleep.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Just get a little extra rest.

• 50:38Shane Parrish?

  What are the other predictors of frequency and pleasure of sex?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Oh, there's like, way too many. So, okay, frequency does not matter, because again, pleasure is the measure of sexual well-being. And frequency of sex is not a predictor of sexual satisfaction, because people vary so much. There are some people who are like, if I don't get it every day, then I don't feel okay. And other people are like, once a month, that's fine, or less.

• 51:02Shane Parrish?

  Everything works. It depends on the relationship.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it depends. And everything is normal. Like, you're not, if both of you are satisfied having no sex, that is just part of the spectrum. You do you. So, I'm not one of those sex educators. It's like, sex is so important. You really need to prioritize it. Because there are some people for whom it is not important. Don't prioritize it if it's not important to you. I'm not going to make anybody. But for the people for whom it is important, there are six factors that increase pleasure. The first is obviously, uh, personal mental and physical well-being. The best predictor, in particular, of a woman's sexual well-being, is her overall well-being. So obviously, if you are getting over the flu, that's going to interfere with your enjoyment of sexuality.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  If you were just diagnosed with breast cancer, that's going to interfere with your sexuality. If you're experiencing depression, anxiety, it's going to interfere with your sexuality. So mental and physical well-being, your own. Two is partner characteristics. And we don't just think one dimensionally about their physical appearance. We're also talking about sense of humor and like watching them be expert at the thing that they do. When my husband's funny, that's the main thing for me. My sister is a musician, married to a musician. And when she hears her husband practicing piano in the other room, like that really does it for her. Partner characteristics. It's not just about like, what do they look like? And here it is again, trust. Like, I think if people remember one thing, they should probably remember this trust piece in a relationship.

• 52:34Shane Parrish?

  How much do you trust your partner? How do you work on that trust?

• 52:37Speaker 00

  And how trustworthy are you with them?

• 52:39Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  That ability to like engage and be present.

• 52:42Shane Parrish?

  The best way to get trust is to deserve trust, right?

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 52:43Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And to give it.

• 52:46Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  And there is a relationship between trustworthiness and willingness to trust. Setting is another factor that influences whether or not something is pleasurable. So some people really love having the same sex in the same bed that they've had sex every time for the last 10 years. Some people really want to be in like a hotel room where they know they're not going to have to deal with the laundry. I met a woman who had vacationed regularly at this one very old vacation house and had great sex at this one vacation house. And one year, they rented a house. It was in the same town, but it was a different house. And the great sex didn't happen. They have three kids. And what she realized was this house was so old, the bed was built into the wall,

• 53:30Speaker 00

  so it made no squeaking noise. So she didn't have that distraction of worrying about the kids hearing the squeaking. And so they're building a house now.

• 53:39Shane Parrish?

  With a bed built in.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  They're building the bed into the wall.

• 53:42Shane Parrish?

  Oh, I like that.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So setting, those sorts of factors make a difference. And there's a lot of things that are very controllable about the setting. And it's easy to figure out what works for you just by thinking about, so like, what are like the great sexual experiences that you've had? Other life circumstances. So this is just like, how stressed out are you about the kids and money and patriarchy and like all the other things, other life circumstances that keep the brakes on. And then the last factor is my favorite. It's called ludic factors. Ludic from the same root as the word ludicrous. It means to play. So how free do you feel to play?

• 54:20Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  With your partner, to have fun, to experiment. They're actually, I know we have these scripts in our head about like what order things are supposed to go in and what we're supposed to do. But the fact is consenting adults are allowed to do anything they want to to each other. Like if you wanna fuck your partner's armpit, you are allowed to with their permission. It's called axillary intercourse. People like it when there's names for things. So like if I can be like, yeah, there's a name for that. Axillary intercourse. Do you? Go for it if you like it. Awesome. If it's not for you, don't do that. Someone asked me what I really like is when my partner licks between the arches of my feet, when the soles of my feet are pressed together. I couldn't find a name for it, so I made one up. Interplanter linktis.

• 55:04Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Now that it has a name, go for it. Like you're allowed to do whatever you want to do. So that freedom to play is the last factor that increases people's experience of pleasure with sexuality. One of my favorite quotes is actually from a Dorothy Sayers mystery novel. Her detective, Lord Peter Whimsey, says that the worst sin passion can commit is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell. There can be no middle path. And that's what the research says is true. The reason these things are true is because of nerdy things having to do with rat research that basically say the way your brain interprets a sensation changes depending on the emotional state

• 55:49Speaker 00

  in which you perceive it, which we all know to be true because of tickling. I know tickling is not everybody's favorite, but if you just like imagine your certain special someone, you're already in like a playful, flirty, turned on kind of thing, and your partner tickles you, that can feel playful and lead to other things. Whereas if the exact same certain special someone tries to tickle you when you're pissed.

• 56:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  Punch him in the face a little bit. And it's the same sensation, but because the context is different, the way your nucleus accumbent shell interprets that sensation is opposite.

• 56:21Shane Parrish?

  I'm curious about something you said, which was, there's a relationship between your ability to trust other people and your trustworthiness.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:30Shane Parrish?

  Can you expand on that?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  So there's a, if you want to know the details about this, there's an amazing, very pretty technical book called The Science of Trust by John Gottman. It's one of his nerdier books that goes really in depth into the science of trust and game theory research on it. But from a logical perspective, it just makes sense because if you yourself are not trustworthy, like if you would violate someone's trust, then of course you assume that the other person would. So in the research, when they do the trust game, they play with money, but I will describe it with cupcakes, if that's okay with you.

• 57:03Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  So the research experiment is, we're sitting here in this room and the researchers have given me four cupcakes. And I have a choice. I can take my cupcakes, go home, or I can give you any number of cupcakes I choose. And because magic of trust, any cupcake I give you turns into three cupcakes. So if I give you one cupcake, you actually end up with three cupcakes, right? And then I still have three cupcakes. And if I don't trust you at all.

• 57:34Shane Parrish?

  I'm not going to give you any.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:36Shane Parrish?

  And if you trust me, you're going to give me all your cupcakes.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  In which case you have.

• 57:40Shane Parrish?

  More cupcakes.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Right. Because after I make a decision, assuming I don't just walk out with my four cupcakes, you then have a choice too. You can take your cupcakes and go home, or you can reciprocate. And then the game is over. That's the basic trust game, right? So if I don't trust you, I'm taking the four and going home.

• 57:57Shane Parrish?

  And we tend to be tit for tat, right?

• 57:59Speaker 00

  That's, yep. The basics is we tend to reciprocate. And the rules baseline are go ahead and trust until you have reason not to. But suppose, like, you know, I've been hurt in my cupcake past, but I'm willing to give you a chance. And so I give you one cupcake, you have three. Assume you're trustworthy. What do you do?

• 58:20Shane Parrish?

  If I'm trustworthy, if you gave me three?

• 58:22Speaker 00

  I give you one, you end up with three. So I've got three and you've got three.

• 58:26Shane Parrish?

  Oh, I don't know. Like, thank you? Give you some back?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Do you give me a cupcake?

• 58:32Shane Parrish?

  Probably, yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you're trustworthy.

• 58:34Shane Parrish?

  And then that way I end up with two.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  You've got to.

• 58:36Shane Parrish?

  And you end up with what you originally started with.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  I have the four I had. I didn't lose anything.

• 58:40Shane Parrish?

  I'd be more inclined to like, give you two as like a thank you.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Wow. So if I'm ever in a position to play this game with you again, I'm gonna be more likely to try and like, maybe give you more cupcakes, right? But if I, I know this is crazy, I just met you, but I'm gonna go ahead and give you all four cupcakes, which means you now have 12 cupcakes. You're totally trustworthy and deserve the total trust I have given you. What do you do?

• 59:06Shane Parrish?

  Should I give you 11 or should I give you six?

• 59:08Speaker 00

  You, well.

• 59:09Shane Parrish?

  I would probably give you 11, because I'm still ending up like a net positive.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Because like, you didn't have any.

• 59:13Shane Parrish?

  But we're talking cupcakes too.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  So like, a normal thing to do would be to like, give me six.

• 59:20Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  And then I've got six and you've got six. That's maximum cupcakes mathematically from this game. So perfect trust, with perfect trustworthiness maximizes cupcakes. And cupcakes, of course, is here a metaphor for the things we give and receive in relationships. Time, attention, love, sex, actual money, sometimes actual cupcakes, let's face it.

• 59:42Shane Parrish?

  That's really interesting, because as you were saying that, I'm thinking like, I always want the other person to end up better off.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:47Shane Parrish?

  Not necessarily equal. So like, when I'm thinking about like,

• 59:50Speaker 00

  You're a giver.

• 59:51Shane Parrish?

  I would give back more. I'm a giver. Oh man.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you gotta make sure in your relationships that you're with other givers, who do, like, the thing I do in my marriage is I know that he will give and give and give until he has nothing left, because that's the kind of person he is. And we both have to pay attention and protect his boundaries and make sure he doesn't just use himself up and wear himself out in support of me.

• 1:00:16Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Like, I don't, because there are people who would just take and take and take and take. He's, I'm really lucky. He's amazing. He's super cute too.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  But imagine if I give you all four cupcakes and you've got 12 and you're not trustworthy.

• 1:00:34Shane Parrish?

  You just walk it.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  And you just like take your dozen cupcakes and go home. I'm over here feeling this is the technical definition of betrayal. I trusted you and you just took everything.

• 1:00:49Shane Parrish?

  In my mind, in real life, like losing the cupcake analogy here, that it doesn't just cause untrustworthiness. It's sort of like you are on the losing end of a transaction. And when you're on the losing end of a transaction, and we're using transaction loosely, not necessarily in the academic or the economic term or sense of the word. You almost

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Exchange.

• 1:01:13Shane Parrish?

  Bide your time to get, like you're inclined, not everybody does this, but you're inclined to bide your time. And then if that person needs help, you won't help them. You sort of like extract some sort of revenge on them, even if you're not doing

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Shane Parrish?

  the same type of transaction. Like it's like you're

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Revenge is complicated.

• 1:01:31Shane Parrish?

  You're a negatively coiled spring, right? And you're just waiting for this person to mess up. And then you're like, you feel justified and

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Shane Parrish?

  You know.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  I was just having this conversation with my car in the car with my sister. We were driving to Washington DC, talking about our ex-boyfriends for some reason. Oh, it's because we drove past where one of them used to live. And I said, I hope he's divorced.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  And the reason for that was because like I was super, we were very young. I was like a kid when this happened and I was like fucked up and he was mad at me because I hurt his feelings. And it's very satisfying to me when my early partners end up having their relationships end painfully. Cause then I can just be like, see, it wasn't just me.

• 1:02:12Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  It's not just that I was, so there is a sort of

• 1:02:14Shane Parrish?

  It's like a bad side of like human nature too.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Like that's not awesome. But revenge is not actually an evidence-based practice. It is only useful if you're in an actual like mob type situation where somebody like betrays your trust. That was, that was my terrible

• 1:02:34Shane Parrish?

  I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Right. So what revenge does, it's not so much about what you do to the person you get revenge against. It's that it communicates to other people, don't fuck with me. So it's power play that's useful if you want to be in a dominant, controlling, pretty vicious position socially. Otherwise, we are faced with the sad reality that there is just a separateness between dealing with the feelings we have about a situation and dealing with the situation itself. In reality, when we are betrayed, when we get our hearts broken, especially when it is the termination of that relationship, we long for an opportunity to hurt that person

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  the way they hurt us.

• 1:03:22Shane Parrish?

  Because we want them to feel the pain.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  We want them to feel the suffering that they inflicted on us. That feels fair. But in reality, if we ever got that chance, it wouldn't give us that satisfaction.

• 1:03:35Shane Parrish?

  There's no satisfaction.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  It doesn't provide that. Physiologically, that is not how the system is built.

• 1:03:40Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  What we have to do instead, we can do it in our imagination, we can talk about it with our friends, we can take that energy, that rage and the sadness and purge it in all kinds of different ways, physical activity, sobbing, writing it out. I have literally like written my breakups as fiction, cried on my keyboard and been like, there.

• 1:04:04Shane Parrish?

  And then you process it, right?

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, like you have to, feelings are tunnels.

• 1:04:07Shane Parrish?

  You're mentally processing your feelings.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  You have to go through the darkness to get to the light at the end.

• 1:04:11Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  So that's what actually works for betrayal and heartbreak.

• 1:04:15Shane Parrish?

  Speaking of betrayal, why do affairs happen?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Oh, God, all kinds of reasons. Basically, insert Esther Perel's research here. Like, she has talked to hundreds of couples about all the different reasons why. The main reason they happen is not anything to do with sexuality. It's because people are getting needs met in that relationship that they are no longer getting met in this other relationship. And affair, for me, technically means that this is a relationship that's happening outside the consent and/or awareness of the other partner.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  I actually just talked to a therapist and researcher in Moscow, who asked a whole bunch of women, so when you think about cheating, if you think there's anything wrong with cheating, what is it that makes it wrong? And some of the participants said that the reason they thought cheating was wrong was that because it was a lie, basically. This describes me, too. Like cheating is wrong for the same reason that like, you know, you said you were gonna pick up the kids at 6 o'clock and you weren't there until 7:30 and they sat there and they waited and you broke your promise and that's not okay. And then there's other people who feel like cheating is wrong because it means your partner has a place in their life where you're not allowed to go. The researcher called it a "secret garden."

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  So it's not just that they have a place where you aren't, where they're hiding it.

• 1:05:38Shane Parrish?

  You can't go there.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  You don't have permission. These women feel they should have access to every part of the domain that is their partner's inner world. So that's not me. And actually, hearing her describe it that way helped me understand why my betrayal, "you broke a promise" explanation feels so unsatisfactory to some people. Because some people are like, yes, absolutely. You broke the rules, you lied to me, you betrayed it. Like, you could've talked to me about the thing you felt was missing from our relationship and instead, you just broke your promise to me. And then there's other people who hear me talking about that and they're like,

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  "It's not really just about that."

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  The therapist in me wants to say that people are allowed, people, any individual human is entitled to secret gardens in their life, places where no one else is permitted to go. And I don't actually, like, know. What would an empirical answer be? How would you even empirically ask the question, is it okay for a person to have a place in their life where their, even their closest friends aren't allowed to go? Even their best friend, even their marriage partner, isn't allowed to go? We would have to look at the relationships and see, like, who's satisfied and who's not. I don't actually know the answer to that question.

• 1:07:07Shane Parrish?

  It seems like one of the indications of stress in a relationship is that sex stops. Is that fair to say?

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  It can be, absolutely. So the way the sexual response mechanism works in the brain is the dual control mechanism, which means it's got two parts. There's a sexual accelerator, which notices all the sex-related information in the environment, and it sends a turn-on signal. But then there's the brakes that notice all the good reasons not to be turned on right now. It sends a turn-off signal. They're both functioning at a low level all the time. And stress is maybe the most common factor in people's lives. It hits the brakes. 10 to 20% of people actually find that stress can increase their interest in sex. But for most people, it may have no effect, or else it reduces their interest in sex.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  So because stress is so frequent and because it is such a common brakes hitter, it's often associated with a reduction in sexual interest and sexual connection.

• 1:08:08Shane Parrish?

  So if sex is stocked in your relationship, it's fair to say that you should probably have a conversation with your partner about what's going on?

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Stress can come from all different kinds of sources, and the stress doesn't have to be about your relationship

• 1:08:20Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  in order for it to impact your sex life.

• 1:08:22Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  It's certainly a sign that something has changed in the relationship.

• 1:08:26Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  That thing could be like a new job, or a new

• 1:08:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  baby, or there's all kinds of reasons why. Or it could be that like, there's being a breakdown in communication and trust and sense of connection in the relationship. It can be.

• 1:08:42Shane Parrish?

  And the connection is gone, therefore like the sex is a byproduct of the connection?

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:46Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  That can be the way it goes. So if you're gonna have a conversation with your partner about your sexual connection, there are some ways to do it that are less likely to result in disaster. One is, and this is the classic John Gottman gentle startup. First of all, you ask permission, is now a good time to talk about this? Or else like, let's find a time to talk about it, because it really is important to me, and I want to hear your thoughts about it. So one, asking permission. Two, the gentle, positive startup of like, here are the things I really love about our sexual connection. These are the reasons why it's really important to me. Tell me a little about like what you value about our sexual connection. Because again, couples who sustain a strong sexual connection, they prioritize sex.

• 1:09:29Shane Parrish?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  So like, what is it about our sexual connection that really matters for us? And then you can talk about, you want to get the other person to talk about the things that they feel like are standing between them and The sexual connection. And in the book, I use this very silly metaphor of sleepy hedgehogs. And the reason I'm bringing it up now is because I saw this wonderful sex coach working with a couple sort of at a workshop. And she had them stand up and she said, so face each other, but put as much distance between your bodies as you need to feel comfortable and safe and good. And the low desire partner stepped back 20 feet.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Right, like the whole stage, just all this space. And the difficult part was not that there was all this space between them. It was that that space was not empty. That space is crowded with months of accumulated like, well, if you really love me, you would. Or like, I don't know what's wrong with me, but your criticism isn't helping and you're not there for me. And all this, like the hurt feelings and the conflict and the misunderstanding and the sense of isolation and the despair and the fear. All like, and in the book, I use this ridiculous metaphor of sleepy hedgehogs. So if you imagine that like the floor between these two people is crowded with like all these sleepy hedgehogs, all these uncomfortable feelings,

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  each of which has to be like picked up and managed with like kindness and compassion so that you can set it free, so that you can find your way back to each other. One by one. Fortunately, when you're actually in this process, once you get the knack of turning toward difficult feelings with kindness and compassion, you can take, did you know that the mass noun for hedgehogs is prickle? A prickle of sleepy hedgehogs. So you can then take like whole prickles of sleepy hedgehogs and move them into the hedge where they belong. When I was doing this in my own, I was like, I'm married to the best man on earth who happens to be a cartoonist. And so when we were having this conversation in our own relationship, he drew our bed with a little hedgehog sized escalator.

• 1:11:41Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  And then there's a little hedge over the side of like the bedroom wall. We're like, we were allowing all the sleepy hedgehogs to help themselves to the hedge off the bed.

• 1:11:53Shane Parrish?

  I like that a lot. Just switching gears a little bit here, I want to maybe a bit more rapid fire as we wind up the show and the episode. What are some of the things that males should know about females and females should know about males when it comes to sex that you find people don't often?

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'm gonna replace your language just for precision sake to say cis women and cis cisgender women and cisgender men, because we're talking about the gender binary.

• 1:12:25Shane Parrish?

  Sure.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  And we're thinking about like the ways.

• 1:12:27Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  That gets communicated. Women, I think, know but tend to downplay the extent to which men are taught that their value as human beings is measured by their sexual prowess. Even if it's not what a person explicitly believes, the cultural message is your worth is measured by the number of vaginas you can put your penises in. And if you can't get your penises into the vaginas because they won't let you, then you lose. P.S.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Women are morally inferior to you, and so you are losing to someone morally inferior to you. And that makes you less even than a woman. These are not explicitly held messages for almost anyone, but the idea with Human Giver Syndrome is that women are subordinate. And if you can't control your subordinate, then you have failed in your masculine duty, right? And so there's this intense vulnerability around sexuality where to reject a man's sexuality is to reject something really fundamental in his personhood.

• 1:13:48Speaker 00

  There is a wound that I think most cis het men are carrying around related to sexual rejection that they will almost never tell anyone about.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  I think. I mean, am I totally wrong?

• 1:14:10Shane Parrish?

  I don't think you're totally wrong.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  And we, especially because the narrative of men is they're supposed to be like super strong and invulnerable, we sort of accept that they actually are super strong and invulnerable and not carrying around these like really deep, permanent bleeding wounds underneath the armor that they have been forced to wear all their lives.

• 1:14:31Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, we're definitely taught to hide vulnerability.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:14:33Shane Parrish?

  And it's a weakness and.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that patriarchal message is, I think, the primary source of violence against women perpetrated by men is that they don't know what to do with all their hurt, but they know that like they can't control this factor in their life and they're so full of rage and despair, it has to go somewhere.

• 1:14:54Shane Parrish?

  It, it, it doesn't make that okay. Nothing makes that okay. But I will add that like, I don't know what everybody else's life is like, but I do know like my friends and sort of you're taught to, as, as males, you're taught to suppress emotion, taught not to be emotional. And increasingly, the message in society is like, you need to be more and more rational, less and less emotional. So you sort of like disconnected from your feelings and you don't get practice feeling.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:15:20Shane Parrish?

  You don't get practice talking about your feelings. You don't get practice feeling your feelings. And I wonder like the long-term impacts of that. Yeah, okay.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  We are living the long-term impacts of that. And women get the same thing, the, the specific message of human giver syndrome. If you're a human giver, your job, your moral obligation is to be pretty, happy, yet calm, generous and attentive to the needs of others. So you suppress every other emotion. Real, like little girls get taught, oh, honey, oh, it makes me so sad to see you with a frown on your face. Don't cry. You put a smile on that pretty face.

• 1:15:57Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  And what that's saying is when you're emotionally uncomfortable, that makes me uncomfortable. And my comfort matters more than yours. So

• 1:16:06Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  you pretend to be fine. So then I can be fine.

• 1:16:09Shane Parrish?

  I don't have to feel discomfort.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:16:11Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  So really early on, we're taught to like, be like, be the managers of the emotions in relationships. And what John Gottman's research shows is that women are indeed in heterosexual relationships, the managers of the emotions in the relationship. Responsible for like down regulating the men who like we get taught something about feelings, mostly about how to deal with other people's feelings, whereas men get almost nothing about how to deal with any feelings. They're granted permission to feel anger, but don't get taught how to like express that anger in a way that doesn't hurt themselves or someone else.

• 1:16:47Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  And women are granted permission to feel sad, which is why women get to cry.

• 1:16:53Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  This message is the source of white women's tears. So we use it as a racist weapon, too. This all gets so much more complicated when we add race to it and we're a couple of white people, I think. Sorry, I don't mean to like weapon, be like assume. But so as a white lady, like I know that like the my cultural gendered message that I'm permitted to feel sad gets turned into a way for me to manipulate and control a situation where I as a white person feel uncomfortable because sad is what I'm allowed to have. And when I feel sad, everyone has to come take care of me. So this is not the direct answer. So the answer to the question, what women need to know about men is they have this like

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  really deep wound and they're not going to show it unless you like get to a really deep place of intimacy and connection. Like it's hard to like even the person I'm married to, this is not a thing we talk about like on the regular.

• 1:17:49Shane Parrish?

  Right, of course.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  What do men need to know about women?

• 1:17:52Shane Parrish?

  How much time do we have?

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  So Come As You Are is 110,000 words long.

• 1:17:58Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  Without references. And I cut an additional 200,000 words.

• 1:18:06Shane Parrish?

  What are the main sort of things that men need to know about or should know, not need to, but like, what do most men not know about women that would make a big difference if they did know about women?

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Every time I think of something to say, I think, you know what, if they knew that about women, then they'd also be learning about men and themselves and it would help them for that, too.

• 1:18:27Shane Parrish?

  Oh, I think that is the ultimate meta answer here is that we actually sort of like learn about ourselves through the question.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  By learning about other people. That's actually called connected knowing.

• 1:18:37Shane Parrish?

  Oh.

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  Whole thing. It's in chapter six of Burnout. Okay, so let me see if I can boil it down to one thing. So emptying my brain. Emily, you have a chance to tell every, to implant-

• 1:18:49Shane Parrish?

  Everybody in the world, one message.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  In every man in the world, one message about women so that you can improve the lives of women.

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  Imagine a world where a presidential candidate says, I can grab men by the dick. When you're a celebrity, they let you do it. And people were like, I mean, yeah. Women, this sounds so big, I'm afraid it's going to sound condescending. Women have the same basic bodily autonomy. That is the right to choose when and how they are touched as men do. They have been taught all their lives that they must make sure everyone around them is comfortable and happy.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  And so they will sacrifice their own bodily autonomy for your sake. And women need men's help to gain full grasp of our own basic bodily autonomy. That we are not required to set ourselves on fire to keep other people warm or to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of someone else's comfort and happiness.

• 1:20:19Shane Parrish?

  That is a great way to end this interview. Thank you so much.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  It's not too dark.

• 1:20:22Shane Parrish?

  No, not at all.

• 1:20:23Speaker 00

  It's pretty dark.

• 1:20:26Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:20:31Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is produced in collaboration with Jason Oberholzer and the team at Charts & Leisure. You can find show notes on this episode as well as every other episode at fs.blog/podcast. If you find this episode valuable, share it on social media and leave a review. To support the podcast, go to fs.blog/membership and join our learning community. You'll get hand-edited transcripts of all the podcasts and so much more. Thank you for listening.