Untrue Sex Stats & Pleasure Facts with Dr. Wednesday Martin

Okay, so let's talk about one of my favorite ways to upgrade your solo or partner play. It is the Hera by Jiu. It's a sleek, powerful rabbit vibrator that's basically the best of both worlds. It's incredible for internal stimulation and those rumbly, mind blowing clitor vibes Jjoo is known for. Here's what I love. The external ears are powered by the same motor as the Mimi, which you've heard me rave about before. I love the Mimi. And the internal arm delivers deep, satisfying vibrations right to your G spot. It's super so soft, ultra quiet. And it moves with your body. So whether you're using it solo or with a partner, it has this feel like it's made just for you. And honestly, it's kind of a no brainer. Everyone loves the Hera and right now you can get 20 off the HERA using code EMILY20@sexwithemily.com HERA that's EMILY20 for 20 off at sexwithemily.com H E R A so if you've been looking for a toy that delivers powerful blended orgasm with thoughtful design and serious quality, this is it. So go treat yourself. You deserve it. Thanks for listening to Sex with Emily on today's show. I'm joined by social researcher and best selling author Dr. Wednesday Martin to talk about her book Untrue. Because, hey, we've got a lot of unlearning to do. Topics include all the things you thought were true about female sexuality. Turns out there's a lot of misinformation. While we aren't necessarily meant or designed for monogamy, despite the narrative we've been told. Okay, so I've talked about the orgasm gap, but guess what? There's an everything gap. And if you're looking to open up your relationship, how do you do it correctly? All this and more. Thanks for listening.

Look into his eyes. They're the eyes of a man obsessed by sex.

Eyes that mock our sacred institutions. Bedroom eyes, they call them, in a bygone day.

Hey, Emily, you got a boyfriend?

Cause my man E here, he just.

Got his heart broken.

He thinks you're kind of cute.

Gotta have her standard. Oh my.

The women know about shrinkage. Isn't it common knowledge?

What do you mean? Like laundry? It shrinks.

Can we not talk about sex so much? Are you kidding me? Oh my God, I feel so good. Being bad feels pretty good. You know, Emily's not the kind of girl you just play with.

You're listening to Sex with Emily. We're Talking about sex, relationships and everything in between. For more information go to sexwithemily.com check out our website because it's awesome. We got posts and blogs and everything on there to help you have better sex and relationships. We love when you comment, subscribe wherever you listen to the podcast. Itunes is awesome or Spotify, Google Play, iHeartRadio. They're everywhere now. Oh also you can find me on Sirius XM Radio Stars channel 109. I am there Monday through Friday, 5 to 7pm Pacific. How great is that? You can just call in, you can ask questions. It's awesome. You can get a free 30 day trial at sexwithemily.com sxm as always, follow me on all the social media. It's exemily across the board. We always have great contests, especially this month, masturbation month. Just a few days left to enter our contest. You could find more information about that on our site. All right, guys, I hope you enjoy the show. Enjoy the interview with Dr. Wednesday Martin. Really excited for my guest. Hello, Wednesday Martin.

Hello. I'm the excited one.

Dr. Wednesday. Really?

Yes.

Like I'm more excited. I don't know if that's possible, but.

I worship at the altar of sex with Emily. No. Yes.

That's how I feel about you.

Of course. Look what you're doing, getting people to talk about sex, educating them in a fun way.

Yeah, it is fun. And I love the way you do it too though, because you are like breaking down stereotypes and you are actually doing the research that people need to hear because it's all the things that we know. So let me just tell you guys real quickly. She's a best selling author. She's written a few books. Her most recent one is Untrue. And all my sex friends are like, have you read Untrue? Did you read Untrue? Really? Oh yeah. Like last year when it came out. Oh great. I'm excited. But I have to say that like I just, I read about you, I read it and now I'm like obsessed with it. I'm like halfway through and read all the studies on it and I know I've read all your other things. So the point is she's. Oh true. Because I can't lie and be like, I read the whole thing but like I'm going to refinish it on the plane.

Do not tell a lie to a woman who wrote a book called Untrue. Exactly.

Thank you.

It's not gonna end well, but let.

Me tell you because people are gonna.

I appreciate your Honesty.

Okay. It's why nearly everything we believe about women, lust and infidelity is wrong. And how the new science can set us free.

We want to set people free, right? We do. That's what we're gonna do tonight.

We are setting people free.

Because you already are.

Aw, thank you. And you guys, just so you know, you can find hernesdaymartin on Twitter, it's wednesdaymartin PhD on Instagram. And wednesdaymartin.com is your website. Yes, that's right. And this will all be on our show notes. If you go to sagslavy.com show notes, we're gonna have the links to everything.

Thank you.

Your book, like, you've debunked so many myths that my head is spinning. I wish when in my 20s I was like you in the sense of I was going in relationships, go in relationships, and I monogamy didn't suit me.

Monogamy does not suit so many women. And there is some new thinking in anthropology and evolutionary biology that if one of the sexes evolved for promiscuity, it is. There's a very good case to be made that it was women. But yes, here we were in our 20s, right? And we would. I know what we did. We would get into a relationship. The sex would be great, the relationship part would be great. Everything would be fun. And then usually within one to three years, all of a sudden, bam. Our libido went down, down, down, down the mountain. And we thought, there's something wrong with me because this guy or this woman is so great. I want it to be like it was before, though. I want the sex to be so hot. Guess I better find somebody else.

Exactly.

Do you know why that happened to us?

Tell me why.

Because nobody told us the truth, right? We were fed a steady diet of lies about female sexuality, including that women are from monogamy and men are from promiscuity. Nothing could be further from the truth. We now have longitudinal study after longitudinal longitudinal study showing us longitudinal studies from Germany, Finland, England, the United States, showing us that in the aggregate, women get bored faster than men do in a long term relationship. Thank you. And that monogamy is a tighter shoe for women in the aggregate than it is for men.

Such a tight shoe. They were never felt right.

There are exceptions, but in general, monogamy is harder for women than it is for men. And like I said, we have the longitudinal studies to show it.

The studies show it. So then where did it go wrong? Like, I mean, I remember seeing this at 19. I said, having sex with one person just seems awfully boring. But I thought, oh, I'll change my mind eventually. I'll. No, never did. Just felt bad, like it was weird. And then trying to talk myself into people that I no longer. Because they're such a great guy. So why did we believe this to be true?

I think that a lot of it got started in the latter half of the 19th century with Charles Darwin, who wrote in his book about sexual selection and in his other book about natural selection that based on his observations, he asserted that females of most species were sexually coy and reticent in retiring, whereas males of most species were pugnacious and aggressive and more sexual. Right. And then in 1948, this English geneticist named Angus Bateman did these studies of fruit flies and he said, oh, guess what I found out. The males really benefit from mating, multiply. They mate all over the place. Their reproductive success goes up and up. But the females really only benefit from mating once. If they mate, multiply, it doesn't really increase their reproductive success. Okay. Darwin laid the groundwork so that when Angus Bateman came up with this, with these fucking fruit flies, people were ready to generalize it to every other species, including humans. And they said, yeah, look, men, of course, they want to just spread their seed and shoot it all over the place, and women just want to be all choosy and coy with their costly little egg. Guess what? There are all kinds of benefits. We found out after women became field scientists and studied what females of different species were doing actually. And they said these females of all these different species are really promiscuous, many of them more promiscuous than the males, especially non human female primates. So why are we still holding onto this narrative? Right, so basically I'm blaming a lot on Darwin, who is also a great hero.

But he's not here.

What we needed is he's not here. You know what? So we needed all these amazing features, female scientists to come in and to bring their own forms of empathy and curiosity to the sciences to improve them. And what they all discovered is, hold on. Females also benefit from mating, multiply. Let's deal with female promiscuity in many species, including humans. And I'm not using the term promiscuity in a negative way, if it's even possible to take the negative out of that. Right. That word has a lot of sting, doesn't it?

It does. Or women who want to have multiple.

Partners, let's just say multiple consortships.

Exactly. That's whatever make you feel Good. We don't want to offend anybody here, but is that kind of what drove you when you're saying women scientists?

I mean you.

And you are a doctor. Anthropologist. What do you do? You've done so many things, everything.

I have a background in anthropology and primatology. I got my doctorate in cultural studies. I wrote about the history of anthropology and psychoanalysis. And I've been obsessed with female sexuality. Are we not meant to be 25 years? I don't know. I guess New York's a really big town.

Yeah, it is, but I live in la and I was in San Francisco.

That explains it even better.

But I feel like we just. I was like listening to your stuff, like screaming, running around. Yes, yes. Because you're like, why don't. Why were we fed this notion? So what do we do now? Because I feel like there are so many, like we've. We believe all this stuff that we've heard that women learn libidos, we just no longer want sex. Or that whole thing about women are. Women are, you know, don't want it whether. And men are.

Yeah. Here's what I like to say about that. When people say, how can it be that monogamy is harder for women? And a lot of times men or women will say to me, you know, my girlfriend is the one who's just not interested in sex. And it's really hard not to say, oh, she's interested in sex. She's not interested in sex with you. Again and again and again and again without mixing it up a little bit. Because women need variety and novelty and sexual adventure. Study after study and untrue. Show us at least as much as men do and probably more, you know, we do.

Exactly, exactly. You gotta keep it interesting and keep it hot.

It's one of those things where the science, when you tell people the science, so many women say, oh, my God, wait, are you saying that I'm normal now? Imagine. Yeah, imagine if we shared it with people. We're not telling couples you have to break up. We're not telling women you have to, you know, step out or open up your relationship. We're doing. We're just saying, let's get these facts, couples. So that when women have the typical drop off in years one to three, if they're having sex with the same person over and over, everybody's aware of it. And instead of the woman and the man, or the woman and the woman saying to each other, or the people saying to each other, there's something wrong with me, there's something Wrong with our relationship. There's something wrong with my partner. They could instead say, oh, no, Emily's just a normal woman being a normal woman. We know this from the sex research. Let's not flip out. Let's figure out how to get her some variety and novelty and adventure. Maybe we remain monogamous, maybe we don't. But there's so much new science now, and we just need to get it into people's hands. For example, I was just at star, the Society for Sex Therapy and Research annual conference in Toronto. Meredith Chivers, the amazing badass sex researcher from Canada, has recently been working on a way to measure female desire, which tends to be triggered or responsive desire rather than spontaneous desire. So we knew, thanks to Rosemary Bassin, that female desire sometimes works a little differently from male desire.

Think about that. People talk about spontaneous and responsive.

Yeah.

So spontaneous desire is so important. Guys, I hope you're listening to this, because this is gonna change your goddamn life.

Well, we're gonna try to make it not void boring either.

Well, that's what I love about you. You're so least boring person on the planet. And you're brilliant.

I love having fun and like candy. Right? Like the COVID of my book Untrue.

Untrue is the book, you guys.

So when male sex researchers were in charge of sex research, they measured sexual desire one way. You know that feeling when you're just sitting there and suddenly you want to have sex? Like you want to have a hamburger? Oh, wow, look what's happening. That's called spontaneous desire. When we only measure spontaneous desire, men seem to have much stronger libidos than women. Along comes Rosemary Basson, a Canadian sex researcher. I like to say, there's something in the water up there. And she goes, wait, I think there might be different kinds of desire, different desire styles. And she discovers that often women are experiencing what we might call triggered or responsive desire. They're not interested in sex. And then suddenly somebody touches their arm and they say, hmm, that's a good idea, or maybe they start fooling around, then suddenly they're interested. So this is called the circular model versus a linear model. Meredith Chivers is working on developing a way to measure triggered or responsive desire so that we're going to have a really good sense. We do know that when we consider triggered and responsive desire, not just spontaneous desire. And when we measure women's libidos at certain times, the difference between the male and female libido is negligible. This is a new thing. We need to tell women that they Have. They have sexual desire and they. They think they're freaks. Right?

So we just. Did we just. Let's break it down. What I always say to them, I say. I say, okay, so you know, like when you're. Let's say your husband comes home and he sees you in the kitchen, or let's see you the kitchen and you're doing the dishes and he comes up behind you because you look so sexy there. Whatever you're doing, you're doing something because.

You have sex and then you're cute ass.

And he's like, oh. And that was so like the 50s housewife. I'm sorry. I can't fucking help it. I just did that example. I'm not gonna correct it because you guys know what I mean?

It could be kinky.

It could be kinky. She was wearing, like, little French. She's not really gonna clean because they have a housekeeper or he doesn't want some cleaning. But that was the hot thing gonna be the French maid. So she was wearing the French maid pretending to do dishes? No, but he came up behind her and she was like, I wasn't ready yet. I didn't see you. But he saw her ass and got a boner. And she's like, what? I'm just sitting here doing the dishes. And I was still on my phone. I wasn't ready to roleplay yet, Bob.

Right.

Most men are more typically. They have more of the spontaneous.

They might, they might. We're thinking that it's like when women became primatologists and they observed the behaviors of female bonobos and female chimps and female macaques. And they said, you guys, the males aren't just mounting these passive females. The females are, like, orchestrating the whole thing. They're like, hey, come on over here. They're tapping the ground in a way that says, like, let's do it right now. It took female researchers bringing those new forms of curiosity and even identification to go, wait, we need to look at the picture in a different way. They changed up primatology in the same way female sex researchers are changing up sex research by just, you know, bringing different forms of curiosity. Right.

Because it was all men studying other men. Even with medications. We're realizing there's so many things that were just men were just being researched or being studied.

That's right.

So we need to find out. We're so different. Are men and women the same? No, we're not the same.

So many things, you know, and the really fascinating thing for me has been how many lies we've been told about. I mean, I just talk about more.

Because your book is called Untrue. The whole thing is on lies. What's some of your favorite lies?

Oh, one of my favorite lies was is that the female libido is a shrinking violet compared to the male libido. Untrue. We just talked about that. Measure it the right way, people, and you will see that the difference is.

So there's nothing wrong with women feeling broken and feeling. I felt broken. Why can't I do monogamy and why can't I?

You can't do monogamy because you're a normal woman being a normal woman. If you can do monogamy, you're also a normal woman being a normal woman. But stop with the lie that monogamy is easier for women and harder. The data blows it out of the water. Go on my Twitter or go on my website, read my article women the board Sex in the Atlantic for people who are resistant to women the board sex.

Hey, we're going to put that in.

The show notes too, right now.

All things Wednesday morning.

So there's tons and tons of data showing that monogamy is actually, in the aggregate, more difficult for women. Then we have the thing about the libido. Let's go to another one. I like to look at infidelity because I think it's like the sort of radical test case of how we feel about gender parity, right? We can say, oh, I believe women should get equal pay. Oh, I believe a woman should be president unless, you know, she really wants to do it and she's Hillary Clinton. I believe in gender equality. And then you show people a woman who is stepping out or who is openly refusing monogamy, and people say, oh, no, not that. So infidelity sort of shows us how do people really feel when women sees a privilege that has historically in our culture, belonged to men. So that's the reason that I'm so obsessed with infidelity. It tells us so much about our feelings about gender. One of the big lies has always been that women cheat for emotional reasons and men cheat for sexual reasons. Now, one of my favorite things that I learned at Star was I looked at. I met one of my heroes, Sarah Hunter Murray, okay? She did a study, one of the longitudinal studies I referenced, about how monogamy is harder for women. But now she's working on this research about what she calls the ever. The myth of the ever ready male. This myth that men always want sex and that when they're cheating or stepping out it's only for sex. And they're always ready and they always want to go. And she's saying, wow, when we profile men this way, we're damaging men. Yeah.

Same expectation for men. We're like, well, I didn't want to go. Now I feel less like a man.

That's right. So bad science about female sexuality is also bad for men. It's bad for all people. So this idea that women cheat for emotional reasons. When I wrote on Tru, I got to interview this great sex researcher. Everybody should know about her. Dr. Alicia Walker. And she did a big study on women using Ashley Madison. And guess how they felt about their marriages. How they liked their marriages a lot.

They just wanted some variety.

They just wanted some variety and novelty. They liked everything about their marriages except they weren't getting the sex they wanted. So they used infidelity, Dr. Walker says, as like a workaround strategy. They wanted to not blow up their marriages. They went on Ashley Madison. Oh, they auditioned these guys. We can't get into it, but they were pretty cold hearted. And anybody who reads about this study will see female sexuality is not what I thought it was. It's not the way it's been represented. And also, women certainly don't just cheat for emotional reasons.

We want to.

Yeah. And plenty of men are cheating for emotional connections like Alicia Walker and Tammy Nelson. Tell us. Dr. Tammy Nelson tells us our motivations for refusing monogamy. Men and women are very, very similar. So those are some of my favorite guys to just blow up.

I love blowing up. Because what I hear too, from friends who are like. Well, like friends who are just going through divorce or they're breaking up with someone.

Like, well, I.

Every time I have sex with someone, I just fall in love. Emily. I can't just date randomly. And I don't. I feel like that's something that they've told themselves or they've been told over time. I'm like, no, you could learn to. Not if you go out there, it's for your pleasure. And you learn to other things.

Listen, if the whole world were telling women all the time, you are such a dog. You just like to go out there and hit on it like you would. You. You'd hit that. You hit. You'd hit anything because you're female. Eventually that social script would get into your head and it would give you permission, if you wanted to do that, to do it right. So.

The sort of gendered social script that monogamy is easier for women is affecting us on a very deep level. I also want to say for some of us, monogamy is absolutely great. But as you know, as a sex researcher, monogamy for an entire lifetime, true, actual sexual monogamy does not conform to any model we have for how we habituate to a stimulus over time to how we're desensitized.

Yeah, like why would it work if we get bored with everything, is what we're saying. Habituate. Right. Like literally and especially now for a while.

That Diet Coke is just boring everything.

It is though. If you had one every day or your house, you want to change your furniture after a while. Like we get bored of everything. Why can't. You can't swap out your mate after 50 years.

Maybe let's not fetishize monogamy and presume that women are the guardians of monogamy and it's our fault and, you know, we're more invested in it. But hey, if monogamy works for you, that's awesome.

It does, right?

Here's the lesson of anthropology, which is the way I look at the world. We evolved as very flexible social and sexual strategists. We can thrive in polygamous relationships, we can thrive in polyandrous relationships. Right? Which is where women have more than one husband, which happens in Tibet and China and some places in India. We can, some of us are asexual, some of us are, we identify as pansexual. Some of us, especially women, might be straight for a long time and then all of a sudden we say, I'm in love with my best friend and I'm in a long term, serious, committed, sexual, emotional relationship with her. And then we might change back again. All that through the lens of anthropology, through the lens of us being very flexible sexual strategists, all that is completely normal. So I just like to say to women struggling with monogamy, you are just a normal woman being a normal woman. I don't ever want to hear a woman say to me again, you don't want to talk to me about sex because I'm really unusual, because I have a really strong libido.

That's what all the woman in your book said. You said they all came to you. So you interviewed tons of women?

I did. I interviewed 31 experts, right? From all kinds of fields from anthropology to primatology to psychology, sociology, medicine. And then I interviewed 30 women between the ages of, I believe, 21 and 93 about infidelity. They all talked to me about it. And one of my favorite interviews was the 93 year old woman who was one of the original Kinsey interviewees.

I know you just found her. She was like, oh, I did this through the great.

Amazing. Yeah. So she participated in Kinsey's. What did you find?

What was your female like? You like, what were the. You said Here you interviewed 30 non monogamous women of various ages too. So what did you. Was there anything that you found?

Yes, well, first of all, the other thing I did is I reviewed over 200 studies about women and infidelity or infidelity and different species, females of different species. So that's how I write all my books. I do some field work. So I also went to like sex parties and I went to polyamory cocktail parties that my friend Misha Lynn from Open Love New York. I love you. Open Love New York. That's so fun.

Wait, Open Love New York? What's that? It's an open.

So that's a support group for and an educational resource for people who are interested in being polyamorous. And it was co founded by Misha Lynn and a wonderful woman named Chrissy is the president of Open Love New York. If you are thinking about polyamory, if you're having a hard time with monogamy and you want support, if you want to play board games with some polyamorous people, if you want to go to a cocktail party with some polyamorous people or go to people don't believe it works. They're a wonderful. I love Open Love New York. They're a wonderful resource.

Get some more information about it. Because people, I think it's getting better. I do feel like people are more open to the open relationships. Like people like I've been doing this for 14 years, talking people and researching. And I feel like at the beginning there people are like, no way. It could never work. And I've noticed now last few years, there's just a little bit more information and people are like, well, we're thinking about it. Even tonight we got a call, we're thinking about opening up. And it's, it's definitely changed in the last three to five years.

See about how people are flexible sexual strategists. Yes. They get bored and like we evolved to be like getting a little bored. What can I do with it? So when you change the cultural container, right. When you have shows like Wanderlust or Insecure, when you have people like Emily Morse talking about non monogamy, suddenly the brush fire starts. That's a bad analogy.

Nobody get it.

But suddenly you're changing the language that people have access to and the thinking they have access to. And then that flexible sexual and social strategizing kicks in and people say, huh, that's kind of interesting. Maybe I could. Of course, there's some people who are like, absolutely not, but can I say something?

Yeah.

Amy Moore's did this fabulous study. I love her.

I want all these women. This is our garmy, our girl army of these women.

You need a gar. You need to add a Amy Morris tear. Garmi. She is a sex researcher who's very interested in consensual non monogamy, just like Terry Conley is and has done great research. So Amy Morris did this study and she discovered that over a 10 year period, people's Internet searches for terms like open relationship and consensual non monogamy over basically the last 10 years increased exponentially. So I like to say that Americans are married to monogamy. But when it comes to our Internet habits and our television viewing habits, our porn habits and our listening to Emily habits, we are curious about our options.

We are curious. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we come back more Wednesday.

Martin.

So what would you say is the thing that people misunderstand the most about non monogamy, how it can work? People just think, nope, you can never do it. Shut down.

I'm like, well, you asked me what the people that I interviewed told me. Yeah. And one thing that those who were consensually non monogamous said was that very counterintuitively, an expert said that this as well, that the consensual non monogamy improved their couple bond, like, hugely. So many women said to me, I love my girlfriend so much more because we agreed to have adventures. And I never thought I could have sex with somebody in front of my girlfriend. A woman would say, but.

You know, we went there and we had to communicate so much better about it, and it forces it, and then it sort of made it us, like, hot and new to each other. And I saw her in a new way and she saw me in a new way. Okay.

Really?

Before I wrote this book, it never would have occurred to me that having sex with someone other than your partner could improve your bond with your partner. I have to say that was very counterintuitive to what you thought before you started.

Untreal. Yes.

But I heard it again and again from the people I interviewed, and I heard it from experts like David Lay, who works with people.

Oh, yeah, I know David Lay. He was on the show years ago. We should have David Lay on the show again.

Yeah, he's really interested.

He's great.

Hot wifing. He writes about hot wifi.

Yeah. And cuckolding. He writes about cuckolding a lot. Lifestyle people are more into cuckolding now. That's a side note. We get tons of calls.

We should get back to that. Yeah.

Experts like David Ley and Justin Lemiller and other sex researchers like Tammy Nelson all told me that their patients report that consensual. And what they see among.

Yeah, what do they see?

They see that the couples become great communicators and they see that their couple bond is really strong and that they report higher levels of sexual satisfaction than people in monogamous relationships. And guess what? Guess who reports the lowest levels of jealousy?

Probably non monogamous people in people in.

Consensually non monogamous relationships. So people in don't ask, don't tell relationships or monogamous relationships in one study reported the highest levels of jealousy, whereas people in polyamorous relationships and swingers, I love swingers. Reported really low levels of jealousy and very high levels of sexual satisfaction. But.

Okay, so that, that makes sense to me. But could it also be because of the way they were raised that there's certain, like, things that could have happened that people who are drawn towards that lifestyle?

You know, I just heard a paper at Star about.

Personality attachment style and how you will do with consensual non monogamy based on your attachment style. And it makes total sense. Right. Attachment is just the way you felt about your first primary caregiver. The person who looked at you and you either saw from the look in their eye that you were enough as you were or you saw like the person saying, I might leave the room and never come back.

And that's like the age of four, before the age of four, right?

Yeah. It's when you're really little.

So your parents can do this at a young age.

So people might want to dig into some of the research about attachment style and consensual non monogamy. We know that people who have an anxious attachment style, it makes sense that consensual non monogamy might make them pretty anxious.

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, oh, okay. Sorry.

I was going to get excited. I'm avoidant.

Oh, you're avoidant. I do believe that one of the. There are several different avoidant attachment styles. And one of them did okay with consensual non monogamy.

Anyway, I think it's very interesting to look at that. But also. So what about the people listening now? Are Going, yeah, Emily, whatever. But I'm in this. That's crazy talk. I'm monogamous, but I just. I want to have sex with my partner again, and I don't want to. It's been 20 years and we've been together for 20 years. And my partner does. It's usually man or woman, whatever. Someone doesn't want anyone.

Okay, first of all, you're a normal person. Being a normal person. It doesn't mean that you don't love your partner. It doesn't mean that you're not in a great partnership. It means you're sexually bored. And that's not a referendum on you or your relationship or your partner. Yes. It's just not. So knowing that and then finding another way. Maybe you don't want to have sex with other people. Okay, so watch porn and pretend your partner's another person. Go watch some people. You don't have to do it. Go watch people in real life having sex together. You can pay people for stuff, though. You can also just go to a sex party and enjoy it for free. You don't have to do anything. I know this sounds boring, but lingerie can be super fun. You know what? Do you remember Marta Miana? The sex researcher?

Familiar?

Okay. She wrote a great, dynamite paper. She's at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which I'm always like, that must be a really fun place to be a student.

Okay. We both went to the same school. Oh, we're from Michigan, both of us, and went to Michigan. Not to cut you off.

No, that's okay. I believe Amy Moore's was. Or is it Michigan? And so with Sari Van Anders, who recently left. But the University of Michigan has some great sex researchers. So Martime Las Vegas.

Las Vegas.

Okay, so Marteme wrote this really funny paper called it's not you, It's Me. Because here's what she did. She did a study. She said, wow, women are getting sexually bored. What turns them on? She did a great study called why Did Desire Wane? Look it up. If you're a woman and you're bored.

I'll put it in the show notes, too.

Why did passion Wane? Okay, this other study called it's not yout, It's Me. She been talking to all these women about how monogamy is killing them. They love their husbands, but they're just not turned on. And then she's noticing that female sexuality has this kind of autonomous quality to it that she hadn't really thought about before. She said, wait a second. Let me follow up on this. She says to the women, listen, she says to the women, if you were having sex with your partner in front of a mirror, how much of the time would you be looking at yourself? And how much of the time would you be looking at your partner? And the men are looking, like, what are you talking about? I'd be looking at my partner? And she said to the women, same question. How much of the time would you be looking in the mirror? And how much of the time would you be looking at your partner? And the women were like, I'd be looking in the mirror, like, a lot. Like, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.

At myself.

At myself. So she said, let me dig into this a little further, like a good sex researcher. And so then she asked them, you guys. To the men, would you have sex with yourself? And the men said, I'm sorry, what? They just really didn't understand what she was saying. And she asked the women, would you have sex with yourself? And a lot of them said, oh, hell, yes. And Marta Miana said, as if they already had. So there's this quality of female sexuality that we need to dig into a little bit more, that women are really getting off on watching themselves have sex. Who knows why, but buy a mirror if you're bored.

So true.

We always talk.

Put a mirror in the bedroom to look.

And now we have the research back.

Look at your vulva, too. As long as you're doing it, put a mirror up to that. People, women don't often look at themselves.

Yeah, not often enough.

No. But put a mirror when you're having sex. It is so hot.

Oh, my gosh.

I agree with you.

Wait, Now I have something to do tonight. I was wondering.

In the mirror, I was just gonna go watch Veep. Not gonna, like, Totally.

I love that.

I am, too.

I'm an hotel. We've got lots of great mirrors in our hotel. Yeah, the one in the shower. And the sweet.

Oh, you.

I'm just gonna go have sex myself tonight. Very excited.

It's great.

I didn't even. I'm so inspired.

It's a great thing to do. Hey, do you have a squish yet? I swear, they don't pay me to do this. No.

What's a squish? But that's okay.

Unbound Babes has this new toy called the Squish.

Oh, I've heard about it. We love unbound babes.

You know how you're always using a sex toy, and when they're hard and.

You'Re like, why do I Have this.

Hard thing in my head. The squish is soft. Okay. And it's also got. It's a smart toy, so it remembers what you like. And also, the harder you push it, the more it vibrates. And then if you let up on it, it vibrates less. It's so intuitive. It's like the iPhone of sex toys. Okay. So I went to Star the Society for Sex Therapy and Research.

I'm having fomo.

You're coming next year. We're gonna be roommates. Okay. Yeah. All right. So Laurie Mintz, who I love, who wrote Become Incliterate, she's wonderful. She wrote a book called Becoming Clitorit about the orgasm gap. And then after she spoke, Debbie Herbineck, who is a Kinsey fellow and a sex researcher, reported some findings from a 10 year representative sample study of. Of thousands of Americans. And Debbie Herbenick said, it's really important that we deal with the orgasm gap. I want to talk to you guys about something called the everything gap. And everybody went, what is this going to be about? So the everything gap basically shows that when it comes to sexuality, there is a very wide difference between male and female experience. Let me tell you some of the facts from the everything gap. Women were twice as likely to have sex when they wanted it only a little bit or not at all with a guy.

Okay, let's all finish.

Yeah, listen to this one. Women were more than three times as likely as men to have had sex that was not at all pleasurable. That's really upsetting. Yeah. Okay, what about this?

Who was more likely to have sex that was not at all arousing? Women were like 15 times more likely to do that. 15. Yeah. And then how about this one? Painful sex. Okay. Women were like 20 times more likely to have had painful sex. I'm sorry, I don't have my glasses on if I don't get this exactly right. It's on my Twitter feed. And what about this? Have had scary sex. 12% of men, 21% of women. That sounds close, right? Yes. How did men describe. How did women describe scary sex? That somebody choked me, that somebody threatened to kill me, that somebody raped me. That's how women described that they had had a scary sexual experience. 21% of them. Or an assault men, 12% said they had a scary experience. How did they describe a scary experience? For men, a scary experience was a woman was going down on me and suddenly I thought that maybe she had had sex with a friend of mine the day before. Right. Or I was afraid that I Broke the condom. So there was a big gap between how men and women described scary experiences. And so we have this everything. The orgasm gap is the tip of the iceberg. We have an everything gap in our culture when it comes to sex between men and women. And we have to close the everything gap as well as the orgasm gap. And, you know, one of the reasons we haven't everything gap is we fetishize. For heterosexuals, we fetishize intercourse. Why do we fetishize intercourse?

I don't know. Because it's all we see.

Because it gets men off. Look how men masturbate. They go like this, right?

Up and down, up and down.

I'm doing this with my finger for the viewers on the radio. You can't see me. I'm fucking my.

She's right. She's doing that thing when you look at your exact skin, okay?

For men, intercourse is exactly like how they jerk off. How do women get off from clitoral stimulation, Right? So when we fetishize intercourse as sex, and most of us think of sex as intercourse, except the people that you've educated, we're fetishizing male pleasure until we become obsessed with female pleasure, until we care about it and value about it as much as we value male pleasure. Women are going to be having painful sex, Women are going to be having scary sex. Women are going to be having sex that they're not as interested in having. So the everything gap just speaks to this enormous chasm and experience and how we are just valuing male pleasure so much more than we're valuing. That's it.

Because every night I'm teaching someone, no, no, no. It's okay that you can't orgasm during intercourse. Most women can't. Every night there's someone who's like, oh.

I didn't know that. I mean, all ages, a lot of women think that. We know that. It's a minority of women, right, who can come from intercourse alone. And if you're coming from Interco, probably it's because you're one of those women who doesn't have a distal clitoris, right? You just happen to be. Oh, listen to this. Here's a rule of thumb. Literally, okay? If the distance.

The distance from the.

If the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are likely to come. If the distance of distance from the glands of your clitoris to your vagina is less than the width of your thumb, then you're likely to come from intercourse. Most women. That's Marie Bonaparte. Okay, she did that. Yeah. And then Later, a primatologist. Just anatomy redid the study. So if the distance is less than the width of your thumb, you are one of those very, very lucky women who can have an orgasm from intercourse, but it's just because your clitoris is close to your vagina.

That's it.

By the way, it tends to be petite, small breasted women. I'm just saying. Most of us, though, cannot have an orgasm for intercourse.

Is it really petite, small breasted women? Because that's me and that's not where my clitoris is.

Okay.

I don't think that I'm literally gonna go back and measure you.

Well, I've never.

But I should.

Your boyfriend or husband or girlfriend might be like, why is there a tape measure here? What are you measuring?

They wouldn't be surprised if they come into my bedroom. Whoever comes in, they don't know what the hell they're gonna find.

That's what happened to the author of Bonk I Can't remember.

Oh, Mary.

Mary from Mary Roach. One of the funniest.

It's amazing.

She writes about how she learned about Kim Whalen and Elizabeth Lloyd's research about the distal clitoris. So she decided to measure the distance. And her husband came in and saw the tape measure and said, what are we doing?

Right? What's going on here, babe? Right.

Well.

Which is so amazing.

So most women cannot have an orgasm from intercourse. But we keep telling them that. And it's not like we tell them explicitly. Intercourse is the shit.

No, but it's all we see.

It's all we see why? Who's making porn? Men. So we had more women making porn.

I love Erica Lust. Is there any other site that I don't. Is there anything I don't know about? Because that's all I talk about.

I love Cindy Gallup.

Oh, I love Cindy Gallop. Make love. Not porn.

She's amazing to do that too. And Erica Lust. But look, we used to have Candida Royale, right?

I love Candida.

We need a female porn revolution.

I get so inspired.

That'll fuel the female pleasure revolution.

Well, that's what we need because we're saying, how do we get back to. To female pleasure? We have to go in a minute. I know you have two sons.

I do.

And so I just want to say, are you starting the revolution with them? Are you talking about female pleasure?

Boy, have they seen.

I can imagine.

The 3D model of the internal female clitoris. They know exactly what it is. They can tell their friends. They say, do you know what? Yes, mom, it's the internal clitoris.

I love that.

So I'm just trying to do it in school. Yeah. And then sometimes they'll say, is there anything you want to talk about? And they say, no, no, not at all. But I just keep. You got to keep the conversation going. I offer to my 17 year old all the time, like, honey, maybe I could come to your boarding school and give a talk about female sexuality. And wow, then he just behaves so well.

Do you want mom to show up with her 3D clitoris?

Don't make me bring my clit to your school.

I got a vulva puppet in one hand. I got the 3D clitoris and I'm coming in unless you do the dishes.

You are a teenager's nightmare. Parenting with Emily, I can't even imagine.

Oh, my God. Wednesday, Martin, you are such a dream. You're a delight.

You are.

You're brilliant. All the work you're doing. Untrue. Check out our book Wednesday, Martin. We're gonna put all this in the show notes and it's wednesdaymartin.com anything else you want them to find you?

No, I just want women to find their clitoris and show everybody where it is. We are in a good fight.

So are you think.

Thank you so much. Thank you la, for everything you're doing and for having me. It was great.

Thank you. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed the show. I did. Thanks, everyone for, for supporting the show and telling your friends and letting them know how the show has helped you and for emailing us and just for staying connected. I appreciate you so much. And thanks to my amazing team, Ken, Kristen, Michelle, producer, Jamie and Michael. Was it good for you? Email me feedbacksexwithemily.com.

There's one overlooked mineral behind better sleep, sharper focus, stronger muscles, and a healthier heart. And at least half of us aren't getting enough. Most people don't realize they're running low on one of the most vital minerals for human health. Magnesium. And here's the thing. No single form of magnesium can deliver all of its benefits. That's exactly why Qualia Magnesium plus was created with 10 highly bioavailable forms of magnesium plus over 70 essential minerals. It provides total magnesium support, helping you sleep better, think clearer, move stronger, and feel your best every day. And honestly, when you're less stressed and more energized, your intimacy and desire naturally benefit too. Sure, magnesium can help you sleep, but Qualia Magnesium plus goes beyond that. It's a whole body nourishment for how you think, move connect and feel more than just a sleep supplement, it's a foundation for daily well being which absolutely supports a healthier sex life. Getting enough magnesium from food alone is harder than ever due to depleted soils and chronic stress and our body's reduced ability to absorb it as we age well. Qualia's Magnesium plus formula is non gmo, vegan, gluten free and designed so all the ingredients work together for comprehensive magnesium support. And personally I've been taking Qualia Magnesium plus in the evenings and I really notice calmer nights and clear mornings in just feeling more grounded in my body which always makes intimacy feel more accessible and enjoyable. It's become such an easy part of my nightly routine. Experience the most trusted magnesium for your purity, potency and performance. Go to qualia life.comsexwithemily for 50% off and here's a bonus use the code Sex with Emily for an additional 15% off your order. That's Q U A L I A life.com sexwithemily thanks for Qualia for sponsoring this episode.