- Hey, everyone, I'm Hannah and welcome back
to another episode of Pleasure Trove!
The only series on YouTube where we talk about culture
and news to do with sex.
Yes, that's right.
So unfortunately, in this episode,
I have no physical things to show you.
But still lots to talk about, lots to discuss,
so we're just gonna dive right in.
First off, let's chat about what's been in the news.
What are people talking about?
So the first thing that I wanted to discuss
is two celebrities, very different coming out experiences.
Recently, Phillip Schofield who hosts "This Morning"
came out as gay and actress Jameela Jamil came out as queer.
And the response to both of these
kind of announcements I guess, were very different.
The way that Philip came out was a statement
through This Morning's social media.
And then him and his co host, Holly sat down
on the live morning TV show and kind of discussed it.
And it was very lovely, very heartwarming,
a lot of stuff about support and family and mental health
and love and just being your true self.
I thought it was gorgeous and wonderful
and I'm so happy for him.
And from what I was seeing on social media,
the general response to Phillip Schofield coming out as gay
has been positive.
There were outcries of love and support for him.
And just general acceptance, which is great.
Obviously that is great.
Jameela Jamil came out as queer in a Twitter statement,
after backlash against the announcement
that she was going to be a judge on the show "Legendary"
which is about voguing and ballroom culture
which has deep roots in the LGBT community.
And obviously she did receive a lot of support
for her coming out, but the her coming out
was kinda like one part of the statement in general,
which was about, is she or is she not qualified
to be part of the show.
She has a huge audience online,
she's bringing new people to it.
She even says in the statement,
that being queer doesn't automatically qualify her
to be a part of the show,
but more just bringing new eyeballs to it.
And there was a lot of support surrounding her statement,
but equally, there was a lot of confusion
and even more backlash.
I think in general, a lot of people find Jameela Jamil
an easy target online.
She is very outspoken, she is an activist,
she's not always getting things right in her activism,
but who is?
And I'm going to link in the description
a really interesting article about the differences
between their coming out experiences.
But ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact
that Phillips was a very proactive coming out,
it was a statement that was very clearly thought through
for a long time before,
there was a strategy almost behind it.
And Jameela's was very reactive.
And people didn't really seem to like that
because it was about something else,
and then it was like, "Oh, but actually I'm queer."
Jameela has a boyfriend
and so I think a lot of the backlash around that
was bi-erasure and pan-erasure,
and also Philip came out as gay,
which most people understand, most people in society,
different ages, different generations,
that is something that people have a concept
and an understanding of, and a white man coming out as gay
feels familiar to most people in our society.
However, it is a different story when a woman of colour
comes out as queer.
And I just want to be clear here
that I don't think it should be the case.
Like I think the two should be the same thing
and we should be supporting
and believing anyone who comes out
as whatever label they feel suits them the most.
For older generations, queer was a slur
and by some it's been reclaimed.
And I think it's just really interesting
to see these two different experiences,
an older white man coming out as gay
and a younger woman of colour coming out as queer.
Who was also fem and has a boyfriend.
So I think there's just a lot more backlash around
Jameela Jamil's announcement than Phillip Schofield's.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments,
what you think of their coming outs,
what you think of the responses to it.
I would be really interested to know.
One of the other things that Jameela mentioned
in her statement was coming out as queer
and talking about sexuality as a South Asian woman
and being worried about the response
from the South Asian community.
And I just wanted to highlight this amazing website
and community called Soul Sutras.
I met the woman who runs this platform recently, Sangeeta
and she is amazing.
And it is a place for South Asian women
to talk about taboo subjects.
So they cover loads of stuff from sex, sexuality,
periods and mental health.
So I'll leave that also in the description
if you're interested in checking that out.
So the second big news story,
we need to talk about consent contracts.
Oh boy, I'm gritting my teeth,
because why are we talking about this?
But clearly we have to for some reason.
Okay, so this whole conversation started recently
when the New York Times podcast did an interview
with the lawyer who is defending Harvey Weinstein.
She is a woman and she primarily defends men
who are accused of sexual assault.
And I would highly recommend listening
to the original podcast.
It is very interesting 'cause like the first part of it,
like the majority of it, is a pretty much civil interview
between two people who clearly have different views.
She seems very smart, and is kind of very gently
offering you rape culture on a plate,
but unless you're listening really carefully,
you might not be able to hear
and properly like see it as rape culture.
And then it just explodes at the end.
And there's no more denying
that this woman's views are really dangerous.
She talks a lot about how not being sexually assaulted
is the woman's responsibility.
So this very much plays into rape culture and victim blaming
The interviewer, Megan Twohey asked the lawyer,
her name's Donna Rutunno, at the end
if she'd ever been sexually assaulted, and she said no,
because she's never put herself in that position.
And I saw a lot of people shouting about this
on social media, and a lot of women
replying to this tweet thread with the position
that they were in when they were sexually assaulted.
And this ranged from babysitting,
to being at work, to being on a date.
But here's the thing about the consent contracts.
So at the end of the interview, Donna says,
"If I was a man today in today's world,
"before I was engaging in sexual behaviour
"with any woman today,
"I would ask them to sign a consent form."
Okay, let's unpack this.
So the main reason why a consent contract will never work
in preventing sexual assault
is all down to one very key component of consent.
And that is, it can be removed at any time.
And then your contract is void.
Consent is conditional.
You may consent to some sex acts but not others,
with some people, but not others,
with a condom, in bed, on the sofa, like whatever it is,
there are conditions to the consent,
and you can change your mind at any time.
And if somebody changes their mind, then you communicate.
I cannot believe we're still having this conversation.
And what's missing from this entire conversation
is any focus and interrogation
on the actions of perpetrators.
I wanna draw your attention to a article
that Girl on the Net wrote about this,
and I'll link it in the description,
and I'd highly recommend that you read it.
But it really opened my eyes on a few things
and the way that we can discuss
and think about sex contracts.
Firstly, consent contracts are bad for a potential victim.
Maybe you sign away that you agree to do X, Y, Z
and then in the moment you decide you don't fancy doing Y,
but then you feel like you have to
or you're being pressured into
because the other person is like,
"Hey, you signed on the dotted line.
"I have your agreement, here's your signature.
"You have to do this with me now.
"So we are going to be doing X, Y and Z."
But what if, and we're going to be hypothetically imagining
a consent contract in this scenario,
please don't ever sign a consent contract.
But what if you negotiated beforehand and you said,
"Okay, yes, let's put in X and Z in this contract.
"I'm happy to do X and Z."
And then when you're in the moment,
and you're like really enjoying it, you're like,
"Actually, I do wanna do Y."
And the two of you like,
"Yeah, yeah, we wanna do Y together."
It's not in the contract.
It's not a contract, so you probably shouldn't do it,
because then that's rape.
I'm doing this because this is a hypothetical situation.
So no one wins in consent contracts
because it's completely ignoring the fact
that consent is fluid,
and you might not just change your mind
to something that you agreed to previously
and then you don't want to do anymore.
You might also change your mind to something
that you said you didn't want to do,
and now you actually do want to do it.
So thank you Girl on the Net
for like making me realise that flip as well.
Like, no one wins in consent contracts, no one wins.
But the potential victim definitely doesn't win.
If someone wants to make you sign a consent contract,
rip it up and get out of there.
But also, that's not your responsibility to do that.
And we should be interrogating the person's decisions
and thought processes to write a sex contract.
Anyway, and one of the other things
that Girl on the Net wrote in her article,
which I just thought was really wonderful,
'cause she was talking about how she's so tired
of having conversations about consent and what it is
and what it looks like.
And she talks about not looking for consent,
but looking for desire.
Because consent is like the bottom line
like that should just always be present,
and then what's the really exciting thing is the desire,
that's the thing that you should be after.
Because if there's that there then
the consent is just always there, should be always there.
So it's not just "Hey, do you want to have sex?"
Yes, great consent, tick.
It's how you wanna have sex?
Where do you wanna have sex?
What do you wanna do?
Why do you wanna have sex with me?
Ooh, like all of those things,
she was talking about how she finds those conversations
much more exciting and sexy.
So yes, we should be having those conversations.
And it's a real shame that we still need
to be drilling home some basic points about consent.
Let's move on!
Now we're getting into some TV stuff.
I watched Louis Theroux new documentary on BBC Two
called "Selling Sex", which was about sex work in Britain.
It followed three women who were all doing sex work
for various different reasons.
And I thought it was really interesting
to see all of their different lives
and the different reasons why they do it
and what they get out of it and how they feel about it.
It did kind of bother me that basically,
all three of them had troubled upbringings
or some kind of abuse when they were younger.
Which I'm not saying isn't real,
'cause I do imagine that
that is real for a lot of people in sex work.
But it was painting sex work in a certain light,
which felt like you have to have experienced trauma
in order to go into this kind of job.
No one else.
A normal person without any trauma would never choose that.
Like, that's kind of how it felt sometimes.
I'd be really interested to know
what other sex workers thought of that documentary.
And if they felt like it was a true representation.
Obviously, it never can be 'cause it's only three women.
And that's only three individuals experiences.
But there were a lot of similarities
in their three experiences,
I was like, it must be broader than this.
And then finally, I watched "Goop Lab".
More specifically, I watched the one episode of "Goop Lab"
about female pleasure.
"Goop Lab" is Gwyneth Paltrow's
Goops Netflix documentary series.
Just putting it out there, I am not a fan of "Goop".
A pseudoscience, expensive, vagina nonsense.
So I watched the Betty Dodson episode
and actually, you know what, I enjoyed it.
I did find it really shocking though that in that episode,
we see Gwyneth Paltrow learn the difference
between the vagina and the vulva.
She just thought that everything was called the vagina,
when in fact, the vagina is the internal part
and the vulva is everything on the outside.
And I was like, this is a woman
who has been selling products for the vulva
and for the vagina, and doesn't know her anatomy.
And she sells products for the vagina,
and she doesn't even know what the vagina is.
And I found that kind of disturbing and sad
but was I actually surprised?
(whispering) I don't know.
Some of the episode was a bit too hippy dippy for my liking.
But I did really like the exercise that they did
with hand massages, and instructing each other
on how they would like their hand massage to go.
And using that as an example of how you can instruct someone
when it comes to sexual pleasure.
Now, here is a question that I have for you,
because I'm a bit confused about what language to use.
So in this episode, the language that they use
is female pleasure, woman's pleasure, female sexuality.
And they are specifically talking about people with vulvas.
And we know that non-binary people have vulvas,
some transmen have vulvas,
and so the words female and women
aren't necessarily applicable to everybody who has a vulva.
So when we're talking about anatomy specific,
we should probably talk about anatomy.
So say people with vulvas, people with penises
or whatever the anatomy that we're referring to is.
However, there is also an element
to what they were discussing in the episode,
which isn't about anatomy, it's about socialisation.
And it's about that socialisation that female pleasure
is less important than a man's pleasure
and that women aren't really encouraged
to look at their genitals or to masturbate.
And so these two things
we're talking about at the same time,
we're talking about how to touch a vulva.
But then we're also talking about reducing the stigma
around pleasure for people who are socialised
and raised female.
So when we're talking about anatomy
and socialisation together, what language do we use?
I would be really interested to hear your input on that
because I struggle because then
basically in the same discussion, I'm flip flopping
between using women and using people with vulvas.
And I don't know if that's confusing,
I don't know if that is problematic.
I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on that.
Okay, let's move on to events.
I want to tell you
about decolonizing contraceptions SexFest,
which is happening in April in Camden,
and I believe tickets are on sale now.
There is a recent episode of my podcast Doing It!
with Dr. Annabel Sowemimo who is the founder
of decolonizing contraception
and it is a nonprofit community organisation
created by people of colour who work
in reproductive and sexual health.
And SexFest is a sexual health and well being event
for people of colour.
So I'll leave links in the description
if you want to go and check it out.
It looks like it's going to be really interesting
and really amazing.
And also have a listen to the episode of Doing It!
with Annabel I learned so much from it.
And I've got something in stuff for you.
Stuff stuff stuff.
This was actually suggested by someone on Instagram
@jadeado I'm really sorry.
And is a reusable tampon applicator.
They're called DAME,
and I'll leave their website in the description.
Looks really cool, super fancy and slick and interesting.
And they say that the applicator is for life,
and carbon neutral, these are the claims they're making.
They also sell organic tampons.
So when I used to be a tampon user,
I would only be able to use it with applicators.
I was never able to use tampons without the applicator.
But then you just like throwing away
tonnes of cardboard and plastic.
But basically it's a reusable tampon applicator
and that sounds amazing.
And you just rinse it and dry it with like paper towel
or toilet roll to clean it, and then you can use it again.
And they say that it's for life.
I'm intrigued.
Does anyone use this?
Is anyone willing to try and feedback to us?
I am genuinely interested.
I don't have periods anymore
with the contraception that I'm on.
Otherwise, I would be like, super down for trying this.
Also, it looks really great and has really great packaging.
So thank you so much for watching
this episode of Pleasure Trove!
Please give the video a like, if you enjoyed it.
And I'd just love to hear your thoughts
on everything that we've discussed, in the comments.
This is a conversation.
And yes, if you have ideas for things
or if you notice something that you'd want to see featured
in another episode of Pleasure Trove!,
then you can tweet me, you can message me on Instagram.
That's usually the best places.
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Bye!