Slut power - Beth Ashley
Transcript for episode 022 of Free Sex podcast
Listen to this episode on your podcast player of choice.
Adam
What does free sex mean to you?
Do you ever think you’d have more sex, or better sex, if only you could change one thing? What is that thing?
From Aunt Nell, this is... Free Sex... with me, Adam Zmith.
I’m a writer, podcast producer, walker, talker, thinker, wanker. I started having sex at 29, TWENTY-NINE, and I’ve been obsessed ever since. What stopped me? I’m on a mission to find out how, as a society, we hold each other back in sex. What could a world of ‘free sex’ look like?
For me: free sex is a world with more places to fuck AND without sexually transmitted infections. How bout you? What you into?
Every episode I speak to a different human with a unique idea for what free sex could mean.
This podcast is fully pansexual and gender fluid: from mild to wild, everyone is welcome.
Let’s go!
—
Adam
How can we overcome slutshaming? My guest in this episode is Beth Ashley, author of Sluts: The Truth About Slutshaming and What We Can Do To Fight It. It's a wide-ranging book that pulls together history, politics, class, identity, gender and activism, and tries to understand the resurgence of slutshaming. Thankfully, Beth has tons of actions we can all take to fight back and get to a world of free sex without such a thing. I remember telling my mum once, God knows why, that I liked sex with lots of different people. And she called me a slut. I laughed it off, of course. But I do also remember the way she shamed me, don't I? Slutshaming sticks. We all need a shower. So let's get wet with Beth.
Adam
Beth Ashley, welcome to Free Sex. Thank you very much for joining the podcast. It's great to have you. You've written a book called Sluts, which I've just finished reading. And it's great. I felt seen. Yeah, exactly. So I want to talk to you about it. What does free sex mean to you?
Beth
It's a rather intense answer. But free sex means to me essentially the demolition of capitalism.
Adam
Right. Yeah. written a whole book. And that's kind of your conclusion about how we can basically stop slutshaming. Yeah, be to like change the entire economic political system.
Beth
100% I think there's a lot of different directions you can look in and a lot of different sources. Like we could blame school culture, the media, the way people are represented on TV, we can blame all sorts of different sources for slutshaming, that they all essentially derive from one place, and that's capitalism. So that is essentially what my book encompasses, the eventual place I ended up was, we need to get rid of that.
Adam
Not an easy feat. And it’s… the book. And now let's well we've got a couple of bank holiday weekends coming up so we can get cracking Yeah, like that. Like, like the, you know, the, you have this like fighting talk there, you know, the demolition of capitalism. And that's, like a huge feature of the book and a huge part of its style. And, you know, the back of the book, the copy that I've got it says, Have you ever been slutshamed? I have repeatedly and I am sick of it. Let's be proud to be sexually expressive and fight back against slutshaming. So the books got this posture of really like, you know, really, like really spoiling for a fight there and it does that all the way throughout. It kind of goes into the history of slutshaming, it goes into the different experiences that all sorts of different people have had with this word slut and this or this concept, you know, of sluttiness and like, and being slutshamed, and then it also has all these these tools, these references, these recommendations for how to change this. And you said, All derives from work work from capitalism. So that makes me think about the chapter or the section that's about the working class and that is what I want to talk to you about first when you say the demolition of capitalism. So what did you find when you looked at the intersection of working class people and this and sluts?
Beth
Oh boy. So I get asked a lot like what like, say I'm on a plane with someone, and I ended up telling them I'm in jail. So like a guy in a pub, they always end up asking me what I cover. And when I say I cover sex and social class are always like, Oh, that's really different. And I'm like, actually, no, no, it is not. It's very difficult to talk about one without the other, unless you're like a posh person who has the privilege of not dissecting class when they look at their sex life and vice versa.
And essentially, to put it in a rather small nutshell, working class people, particularly women, but also men, and people beyond the binary as well, are seen as sluts, quite often just just as much as they're seen as like Chavs, or benefit bashes, or insert horrible phrase you hear repeatedly about working class people, I think, even if they don't perhaps say the word. Slut is also another one that could fit right in that we have this view of the working class being lazy, that comes up in narratives all the time in the media, in our personal conversations, there is this very, very intrusive and pervasive myth that working class people are just like, after your money, don't want to make it for themselves, and are this like sort of lazy class.
And there's a very brilliant academic that I cite in my book, who has done lots of research into this. And essentially, sex is categorised within that area of laziness. Because sex is leisure and sex is play. It's almost like grouped in with things like doing drugs, like recreational drugs, or lying on the sofa. It's somewhere on that same spectrum of laziness. And I guess greed, like they're seeing sex in abundance as like, gluttony. Which is interesting, because that's obviously a very religious like coded word. And religion plays a lot into our ideas about slutshaming, as well. But essentially, there is this idea that working class people are, like, kind of just shaggers. Like they're just shagging sort of mercilessly in a way that posh people are not. And in some ways, that's true. And I explore that in the book, but it's about the way that we're framing it. It's not a bad thing to want a lot of sex in your life. Yeah.
Adam
Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it seems like an indulgence like that. Well, if you've got time to indulge in that, why haven't you got time to work harder, or earn more money or something like that? That's another way to like, beat people down. I wonder about the term working class and what you think about how useful that is? Obviously, it's useful to you as a writer in writing the book, because you've used that term. But in terms of like, Who is that at what group in society? Is that actually describing? And is it including people that don't use the term about themselves? And yeah, I'm wondering about that, especially because, like, the way that different groups in terms of economics, the way that different groups now, like live are very different from when, this concept years ago of like, there is a working class and the middle class and an upper class was like set down. Like, you know, there's now we have like the precariat, and the, the freelance, or, you know, whatever, all of the all these different things. I'm wondering how useful is that word? And I was thinking about, I mean, working class, it was thinking about
Beth
capitalism and sex. Yeah, yeah, sex is super complicated. Sex or sex is complicated, but class is complicated as well. Especially in might have done a Freudian slip there. In the it's especially true in the UK, that class is just this like, incredibly complicated beast. Because in a lot of other countries, there are less social class groups, and there are in the UK, and I think like in terms of Western like developed countries, social mobility is harder here as well. But interestingly, and I think this is like maybe what you're getting at as well. There's like this statistic I annoyingly can't remember off the top of my head. That just a ridiculous amount of people in the UK self describe as working class, which isn't possible, like a huge myth, like amount of people who are actually probably middle class, describe themselves as working class, which I think makes talking about class really complicated because a lot of people either don't know what group they're in, or they're pretending to be in another group, because of some sort of means of getting ahead, you know, we see all over Tiktok stuff about people cosplaying working class and the middle class people - ‘where's my baccy trend’ stuff and it all becomes really convoluted and complex.
And so sometimes I do think that yeah, talking about the working classes a bit like, who are we on about because everybody seems to think that they're working class. But so I think really anyone who works in sort of like labor and services and stuff would be the working class, but so is everybody in I guess what you would technically call the lower class, it's just not a term that I really like, I think we should come up with something a little bit nicer for them, which is the people on benefits and the people who are long term unemployed, and the homeless. And that's also a bigger portion of society that then I think a lot of people think so like, when I say homeless, I'm sure like lots of like, listeners might be picturing people sitting on the street with a dog and like holding a sign and stuff. But actually, an extreme amount of people in the UK are homeless. That's a student. So homeless, homeless just means you don't have a secure home. So when you think about it in that way, quite quite a lot of us are homeless. So that's, that's.
Adam
Yeah, so then how does being working class being in one of those categories affect our sex lives?
Beth
A lot. It even, you wouldn't think it when you're like, you know, getting railed, you're not really thinking much about like what sort of house you grew up in. Actually, it actually affects it a lot. So working class, people, women, mainly, but it does include men as well. And much more likely to reach their sexual debut, formerly known as losing virginity. But that's not real. at a younger age than someone who is middle class or upper class word. There's some really like funny statistics. But I also recognize them a lot from my teenage hood, which is that working class people are less likely to, like lose their virginity is again, in quotation marks in a bed, they're more likely to do it in a public place. And that's because of family setup, such as like small social homes with lots of siblings and stuff. So you end up having sex with someone in a car or in a park, because you need to get out of the house.
Whereas like, if you've got more money, your kids have their own, like private areas and stuff. So there's loads of loads of like really interesting things about how we debut with sex, depending on our class, but also when we get older, there's a lot of like, really fascinating research out there about our relationships with our parents and how it affects our sex lives, and how this affects our romantic relationships as well, which like, won't cross over for everyone. But for some people it does. Well, like, if you're rich or middle to upper class, your parents are much more likely to have some sort of say, or rather control over who your partners are. And even your like sexual partners who adjust your sexual partners. And that's less so in working class communities. There's also a lot of danger with sex to being working class working class people, particularly women, and particularly queer people are more likely to be sexually assaulted, which is really, really sad, and also much less likely to have the resources to fight back about it. They're more likely to be slutshamed on site.
So like, if you have Yeah, and this isn't makes working class really complicated. Like you were saying, as well. Some people are visibly working class and some people aren't. I've been told that I'm passing before, which was something that really confused me is in passing as middle class. But other people are not like, you know, my brother, for instance, walks around in the McKenzie tracksuit, all the time vaping. So I'm sure everybody knows he's working class on site. And there's lots of interesting. There's lots of interesting studies out there that show that if people look at you and they see those cliches stereotypes on you, they automatically assume you are highly sexual. Yeah, so I could I could go on for three hours, but there's so much of facts. The way that we have sex, especially if there's an those are like cross class sex that gets complicated.
Adam
Oh, god, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there's, you can see there in those, those things that you've listed how sluthaming comes in, because if You're having sex, which is like earlier than other types of people. And if you're having sex, which is maybe more visible, because it's more likely to be in public. And if it's sex that's maybe more dangerous. And if it's sex with people that you are choosing and not being chosen or influenced for you, then like all of these things are things that can lead to being slipped, shamed. I think it's a really good summary there of how like being working class is a sort of occupational hazard if you're trying to not be shamed, you know, if you're trying to just have sex. Without that, without that prejudice thrown against you. You talked about the virginity myth, a minute ago, you referenced it. And that was that's reminded me that was another part of the book that I really liked. Can you can you say like, you know, if I know it, we're trying to get in the end, we're trying to get towards the demolition of capitalism by the end of this episode. But like, one of the one of the, I guess, milestones on the journey there is ending this idea of virginity, I guess. Right. So what's the what is the virginity myth? Tell me about that. And how does that relate to? Yeah, how do we get to that free sex world? I guess?
Beth
Yeah. So the virginity myth, I think is something we can all relate to. I am still working on getting it out of my own like personal, like, Lexus like it's still in my vocabulary, even though I don't believe in it. And that's because like, we're literally raised to speak like that. In sex ed classes in classrooms, they will talk about virginity non virginity, losing your virginity, my sex ed teacher use the phrase popping a cherry so that that's the standard that we have in like classrooms. And obviously, I was in school donkey's years ago, but it's still banned. It's still not up to standard. virginity is still something that's talked about like it's real, even in medical environments, like the journalists are Sophia Smith Galer is on those and investigating individuality testing and stuff. But she also found that people were being denied medical attention and like different surgeries and scans and stuff because they were virgins. So there were even doctors who are still believing the vision virginity thing, that's how entrenched in society it is.
And essentially, it comes from purity culture, which is a phenomenon that came from evangelical evangelical Christianity, which we tend to associate with America. But this is another mistake. This it's all over the UK as well. And plenty of other other countries, other cultures, almost every religion has its own version. It's just, you know, Christianity seems to be going pretty hardcore with it. That's kind of the main area you look to and we're thinking about purity culture. And it's yeah, it's as old as time purity culture. And it essentially hinges on the idea that virginity is everything. And it comes back to gender roles, which is capitalism. Purity culture, okay. Yeah, even though it's in wrapped with religion, it's not really about that. So in these religious communities where purity culture started, they wanted men and women to behave, they wanted to behave in very particular ways, in a way that they would see a society moving forward. Like if we want society to progress, we need women to be making babies. And we need men to be working. And we need everybody to be constantly self improving, seeing themselves as unfinished objects and constantly self improving. And if we tell them that God likes specific things, and that you'll go to heaven, or hell, depending on whether you follow these rules, we can keep everybody nice and clean, and pure. That word pure comes up a lot in those communities. But even though it's really easy to point the finger at religion, I'm not religious and never have been. And yet, I see plenty of the same themes in my own life and in my childhood, and in the media and stuff. So it's essentially leaked out of those communities and become a big part of our society. And that's happened through our sex ed, like I've mentioned, it's happened through our media, the way the characters represented and stuff.
So we've ended up all underneath this purity culture that tells us virginity is a real thing, that it's something to be protected like a precious artifact, and that when we let go of it, we should be so unbelievably sure that we need to have married that person, like willingly entered matrimony with them, before we open our legs. And the reason that this is more about gender roles than it is about God or even about sex, to be honest, is The manner to told to control the sexual urges themselves and told that they're bad people if they don't. But for men, it's about controlling their minds that it's about, you know, I'm having these thoughts, how do I deter them? With women, it's about their bodies. They tell women that they're born with these bodies that are automatically sexual, and they need to control them, they need to cover up and they also tell them that they're responsible for men. So as much as men need to be thinking about their thoughts and calming it down. It's ultimately women's responsibility to not lead men astray. And that's where
Adam
we start thing happens then it's the woman, the woman caused it. It's always
Beth
the woman's fault, boy, yeah. And even though we're talking about an archaic kind of religious tradition, I'm sure that as I start to say things like that, it starts to feel really relatable. If you look at the way I don't know home records I looked at then it's never the blokes fault. It's always like this slutty sexy woman come in wooed away my husband like a witch. And that's just not what happened. It's this demonisation of women's sexuality. And it also bleeds into our psychology with things like the Madonna/whore complex, which is such a grim theory that men can only ever be attracted to horse, but ultimately, you need a Madonna to be their wife. And it creates this idea that there are women you can fuck and women you can marry. And gross. And yeah, this is all about gender at the end of the day. But where did gender roles come from? Like?
Adam
Yeah, well, capitalism, right? Yeah, you were saying how, like the, you know, those been part of the, the creation and evolution of capitalism was like, the labor that women do to like, make babies to keep making workers and other people who will do the labor of like, raising the future families and, you know, doing what needs to be done in the house, and then also making the people who will be the labourers, and then the men being the labour has been the workers. Yeah. And I think that that's like quite a alienating concept to a lot of people, even though they know that even though the effects of it are still living with us, because it's kind of like quite a 19th century, like, Industrial Revolution era way of thinking about things.
And yet, like you've said, the consequences of this are still with us, and where it's not quite as simple as what it sounds like, when you when you break it down like that. But it is essentially, Part of that's the foundation of, of capitalism. And then the other thing that you said, which is another foundational thing of capitalism is just how, like, we always have to be self improving, and how, like, we have to, yeah, yeah, in order to do that, we always have to, like be buying new products, whether it's to look good, or to like, continually, like, be better cooks. And so now we have to have air fryers or whatever. Like, chuck, chuck out the old deep fat fries that we had, and you know, just keep consuming. Yeah, basically. So yeah, it's all it all drives consumption. Yeah, doesn't it? And it's, that's just an interesting paradox, to think about the negativity of driving consumption in the context of like, slutshaming, and, and being sexy, because, you know, if we were consuming each other, we just spent a lot more time consuming each other. Yeah. And not consuming air fryers. We have a better time. Yeah.
Beth
It's all air fryers. As far as I know, I know what you mean. I like like you were saying, I run into this problem a lot with my job and trying to like get get people to understand things. I think a lot of like, the academic texts that we have that like criticizing capitalism, or looking into sack shame, and where it comes from, it can be so heavily academic, and it can reference really, really old theories that don't feel so relatable to us, which is why I tried like really, really hard to come up with like super modern, like as recent as the end of last year, examples of like, what how it's derived, and how it's changed. And obviously, the capitalism we have now is not the same capitalism we had when the Industrial Revolution was starting. Now we're in like, modern capitalism, where everything is about buying products. But even if you have a flick through Instagram, and you see this like, really grim grind set community, which is essentially just people, not ever letting themselves be happy, it's just about like, no resting on your laurels. Move the goalposts, like, once you achieve this thing you achieve the next thing, there's this this really toxic, like grind set happening. And, you know,
Adam
I've not heard the word ‘grind set’ before.
Beth
Oh, I'm so jealous. I think because I am I do I can't believe I'm admitting this publicly. But I do CrossFit over I think because I do CrossFit, I have this like real like, just like wanker community on my Instagram. That's full of people like and it's massive in gym culture and diet culture, but also in work culture as well. So people are constantly pushing themselves forward, no resting on your laurels, like, what's the next thing? How can I improve blah, blah, blah. It's all about cheese achieving perfection. It's like your bloody you genocide yourself? That's not a word. But yeah, it's it's really intense. And I think when you're inside it, you don't really see it that way. You just see it as self improvement. And how bad could that be. But really, that's just you living under a system that's telling you never good enough. And so you need to keep buying into things and keep behaving in the way that systems are telling you to. So that you can achieve something that's impossible, you're never going to get there. And that might not sound like it's related to sex, but this is all intrinsically linked.
Adam
Yeah, it is. And I did an episode of free sex about a month ago, or so with personal Susan Bratton, from America, and who is like a sort of sex per online and makes all these online guides and also has like vitamin pills. And I think maybe some toys, and lots of videos and for all different kinds of sex. And I was just quite like, overwhelmed. I mean, it's a fun episode, because you can sort of hear me occasionally speaking to her and being a bit like, wow, this is like really intense, because, like, a lot of the way that she talks about all of these things, and obviously like I'm, I completely stand beside her, and behind her in terms of like, helping people to have the sex that they want. Like, obviously, I agree with that. But I just felt like way, way, way, way overwhelmed, because she was like, Well, I've got this five step program, and this 17 part video series, and this set of vitamin pills in this set of libido supplements. And it just felt all the time, I was like, wow, if I'm not doing like, some of these things, I must be having really bad sex. And I have to like get the libido pills and do the, you know, the 17 step video workout for my pelvic floor muscles in order to like, have really great sex. And I was a bit like, wow, God, I'm a bit overwhelmed. Yeah,
Beth
I mean, I wanted I originally talked about stuff like that a lot, lot, lot more in the book, but I went on about it for so long, it started to feel like I was writing a different book inside my book. So I had a lot of feelings about the sort of sexy sex capitalism side of sex. Yes, I so there's something inherently anti capitalist, and like very brave and very. Yeah, anti capitalist about just having sex having the sex that you want, without any sort of guidance from society, if you're already kind of revolting there. And also, sex is free, which is probably why capitalists hate it. Yeah. You know, going to a sex party is not free and sex toys aren't free and neither libido supplements and you don't need them, by the way. Yeah. No shade, but there's no such thing as a sex drive.
So libido, sex pills won't do anything. You know, porn’s not free, or at least that depends upon you're looking at however, if you do just want a bunk on a sofa, like that's free. Yeah. Which is probably why there's a huge so that's probably why there is a massive industry for telling you that, that there is something wrong with you in the bedroom, and that there's something you can purchase to get that fixed. Fixed. Yeah. There are all manner of like different sex problems. We can go through whatever that is literal sexual dysfunctions like erectile dysfunction or vaginismus. Or more like kind of everyday things that pop up depending on your kind of like stress levels, such as like just a low desire for sex, just not feeling it and that can upset people sometimes, especially if it goes on for a long time. Yeah. Pretty much all of it, you know, aside from the stuff that is like disorder level, like I need to speak to a psychiatrist sort of stuff, the day to day sex problems that we go through. The vast majority of it can be fixed through communication and exactly what you said earlier, which was consuming each other more than we're consuming. Shit. But capitalism really doesn't want you to know that. And that's why we've had this like, massive, like apps that teach you that you can talk. Like, there's an app I can download. I downloaded it for a bit, where like, I can talk to my partner and communicate with him about sex through it. But like, why wouldn't I just go to the room? What planet are we on? And this? And this this thing where millions of dollars?
Adam
I mean, what is the name of the app? I'm really curious.
Beth
There's a there's a few of them. I'm writing about this soon. Well, there's there's been a few that's popped up. There's like an app, I think it's called Spicer, where you can like almost like a Tinder, swipe, go and different, like swipe on different kinks and stuff. And then if your partner matches any of yours, you now have a list of things in the app, it tells ya and Paired is supposed to be like squashing relationship therapy into an app. So you do all these games and quizzes and stuff. But like, I'm sorry, it's enough. It's not enough. And it's stopping us from communicating with each other in real life. Like, it's Yeah, ultimately, a lot of these like sexual problems people have can just be fixed through talking. And there are so many like there's loads of startups being aimed at men right now about like erectile dysfunction and performance anxiety. It's like, by these magic pills, or this magic like boosts Do you think you can put in your drink at the gym, and I keep horny later on? And it's like that, some something like 60% I think I said this in the book like 60%, I think of men under 50 have erectile dysfunction from psychological problems, which things like Viagra or any, any other kind of supplement physically won't work like that. That's not how those drugs were labeled boosters of bollocks. So I'm just getting really sick of seeing all these different startups. Here, we're just sort of noticing as a sex thing going on in next in the last few years. And they're just like, they're to get their bag like, Fine, fair enough. Debit terms of capitalism to Yeah, and it's, like, you don't need another
Adam
lot of air fryers, isn't it? Yeah, sexual. airfryer it's a seller's that we that we think is gonna like, solve our problems and save our lives and make us healthier and make us all these things. I really
Beth
wish you were around to give me the soundbite sexual airfryer for when I was writing the book. Where were you a year?
Adam
I don't think airframes were around. They were not around yet. Okay, let's go back to sluts a little bit more than in the book. And I'd like to hear you say a bit more about the different types of identities. Like the way that racism and slutshaming into intersect and the way that by phobia, and maybe other like queer phobias intersect with select shaming. Tell me about what you found there with the ways that these different identities intersect.
Beth
Yeah, so a few chapters of my book focus, like very specifically on different marginalised communities and how slept shaming is different than them. Stash us because I belong to a couple of them that all and how that creates a very different fight, like like you were saying, my whole book sounds like I'm cruising for a fight the whole way through, I am very feisty. But that that fight is very, very different depending on who you are. I think a lot of the time when people think about slutshaming, there is a very particular person who comes to mind in a celebrity suit and I do talk about her and that's Taylor Swift, because she has been just kind of become the poster girl for slip shaming, in a way and I do feel very, very sorry for her to it's got to a point where she I think she released a song. I'm not a swift either. I'm sorry. I think I think she released a song about it recently as well. But Taylor Swift is a very,
Adam
I don't know. Sounds like sounds like
Beth
while what's happened with the likes of her is very, very sad. She is a rich, white, able bodied, straight as far as we know. Person Yeah. It makes her slutshaming fight. Very, very different from what a lot of marginalised people are going to experience. So the main sort of, like communities that I focused on. Were people of colour, queer people, working class people. And of course, gender, which we've already covered. Like basically anyone who isn't a man Um, would be considered a marginalised gender. And within each of these communities, whether we're talking about people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, black people, any other person of colour, queer people, they all are proven to be slutshamed way more than people who do not belong to those marginalised communities.
But not just that shamed also what I refer to in the book as slop framing, but really it's it's essentially, sexualization is that they're assumed to be slutty a lot more than their slutshamed for sex they've actually done. So what we find essentially is with more privileged people, if they do, they are victimised by slutshaming, but it's usually stuff they've actually done. Not that that makes it okay. But was was marginalised people, they're much more likely to be slapped, shamed over perceived sexual activity. So a very easy example I think a lot of people can relate to if they even know someone who's gay, let alone is gay, is people heavily assume a lot of stuff about gay men. And there's a bunch of studies out there, tell me about it. That's that proves that people think that all gay men are like, just like having an orgy every single night. And some of them are, but the majority of them are just like popping fluffy socks on at the end of the night and have a cup of tea like, like it's not. It's not like free for all fuck fest, but every single game out on the planet, and that shouldn't be a difficult thing to get your head around. But when people are speaking to a queer man, one on one, they might quite often assume that there are things about their sex life, and that might not necessarily be true.
And that that ends up being all more complicated as we go through the gay alphabet. Because obviously, there are lots and lots of different types of gay and we're like learning more kinds of gay as the years go on, which is fantastic. But they all come with their own, like sort of lifestyles, different ways of thinking, ways of having sex. And that comes with different ways of sluthaming. So bisexual women are heavily slutshamed, but in different ways to bisexual men, and in different ways to lesbians and men who are fully gay. It's very, it's
Adam
very, very constantly interesting to Yeah, and it's, it's really interesting to think about these intersections, because if I know, you know, if your ultimate goal is to demolish capitalism, and demolish slutshaming, as a, like, you know, like a village on the route to get to that final destination, demolishing, slept, shaming, sort of it, it has this. It has this allegiance, really, with anti racism and anti sexism and anti LGBTQ plus phobia and stuff, right? Yeah. And so I wonder whether you think like whether you think that the anti racist movement and the feminist movement of the anti sexist movement, and the LGBT rights movement, whether those movements are incorporating anti slutshaming enough in how they articulate what they are aiming for, or whether slutshaming and talking about sex is too risky for them, and how that has changed or not changed? What do you think?
Beth
I think I agree that sex doesn't come up enough in a lot of those debates. But it's also much much easier for certain people to have public conversations about sex and select shaming than it is other people. When the SlutWalk for instance, started, which was like, like a form of slut pride. And it's just, it's just come back last year after like a hiatus that started in Toronto in 2011, I think. And when, when it first started, I got a lot of criticism from people of colour, quite rightly, because it was really white centric, but what the SlutWalk did, which I like massively commend is it essentially became like, trans global, and it was happening in countries where in the you know, like India, where sex is harder to talk about, and it also started involving more queer people to and trans women. And I think I think we do need to talk about sex a lot more in those in those areas in anti anti racism and anti sexism in the LGBT movement are pride.
But it is harder and also a lot of the movements that pop up I just very white straight, Taylor Swift vibes, sorry, Taylor Swift for like really coming for you. So I see why people who are marginalised don't really fancy joining in all the time because they're not always having that invite extended. So I always try quite hard when I talk about this sort of stuff to extend the invite. And I also think maybe sometimes people who aren't marginalised or like, can't relate to specific things, think that they shouldn't talk about it. But actually, we absolutely shouldn't. You don't have to? Yeah, I mean, no something, hopefully to stick up for it. And to make sure it's being spotlighted. and stuff. You know, I do a lot of journalism around trans rights. I'm not trans. But that doesn't mean that I should just leave it like it's too urgent. It's too urgent, delete it. So yeah, it's about like, fighting together and not just thinking about yourself, which comes back to capitalism. Again, we live in a me culture, it's all about me. And I regret to inform everyone that it's not about you. You do? Do you need to be thinking as a community rather than as an individual? The individual individualistic thinking is partly
Adam
Sorry. Yeah. Is there a community of sluts. Yeah, in politics, and, you know, how powerful is that as a as a community? And should it be louder? Is there a community of sluts emerging online?
Beth
I think. Yeah. So there's been there's been this big movement with like, reclaiming the word slut. And that's, that's actually quite old. That sort of started in the 70s, I think. And like, there was that iconic moment when Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill had slipped written across her stomach, and then it became massive with the SlutWalk. With people owning the word slut There were people making art called Diana Slut and stuff like that. Then it kind of went quiet for a while, and then it may have felt like slutshaming made a bit of a comeback. Not that it ever went away. But certainly with people calling it out. It got quieter. done the likes of Andrew Tate entered the scene. And slutshaming is a huge, huge, huge boo, hiss. Fuck you. likes you? He, he uses slutshaming a lot, because it's a brilliant tool for misogyny and he's a self identifying misogynist. So of course he's a massive slutshamer. Yeah, he starts he says horrific things such as women need to have their body counts on their foreheads. And that would solve 99% of the world's problems. I think that's almost exactly what he said. He also likes to talk about how slut. Shouldn't you know get justice for rape because if you're a slowest, and that was obviously going to happen, that's not a quote, but paraphrasing something he did suggest on a podcast. And that created this kind of like weird slutshaming movement. That's that's made a comeback.
You know, body counts are huge at the moment. If you type body counts into TikTok. It's like millions and millions of videos, billions of views, where strangers just walk up to people and ask their body and judge people for it. Lovehoney found, the sex toy company found recently that 40% of people is roughly 40%. I can never remember numbers exactly. But it's in that area of people around the ages of 18 to 35, care about body count want to know their partners and the answer affects them when they're dating. So for some people, it's an important question to ask on a first date, but I don't think that would have been the case 10 years ago. So there has been this slutshaming uprising. Basically there was a there was an anti slutshaming uprising in 2011 onwards, and sex positivity movement that is part of that as well. Then as that kind of went ever so slightly quiet. Not even really they just did it was just less covered less loud, less new, I guess. Then the slutshamers come back heavy. Come in hard. And you take turns up Who invited him and it creates this. Like awful slutshamer culture and it feels like we're back in the early noughties, the way that people just frivolously slutshame women and gay people again, and it's just it's it's unbelievable.
So with that, there is a small but mighty, anti slut shaming movement starting again, there are like some really really brilliant people out there. There's like slutocial who they do like Slut socials in London, I've not had a chance to go to on the one in London, but I really want to run by two brilliant people who will call themselves slut and encourage women to to and like pop that on its head and use it as like a powerful term rather than a degrading one. There's loads and loads of communities out there like that. And there's also loads of communities who focus that on specific marginalised communities. is people like Scotty Unfamous who do these workshops think it's called black magic, best whole life. So she uses the word hoe rather than slut But it's the same it doesn't say anything. Yeah. And that's perhaps a term that's a bit more relatable to some black women as well. Because even the words we use have different ideas like horror comes up a lot more with working class and queer communities, which is interesting. And obviously, the word ‘jezebel’ was literally created for women. So that's super interesting. So I think there's loads of amazing people in creating this political like, content and this like sort of anti slutshaming comeback, and I do think it will get loud making
Adam
making a voice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe that is where we should leave our conversation now because like to sort of pass over to some of those people that you just mentioned there and to sort of, you know, before we get dragged down again by Andrew Tate just end on that. Like, yeah, this the pro's process. Yeah, I think it's really invoices that hopefully will grow. Yeah,
Beth
it's really important not to feel bogged down. I think it can be really hard to hear all these statistics in here like annoyingly part of like anti slutshaming is convincing people that it's a problem, because people think of it as a school girl thing, so I have to break down all the ways that it's absolutely fucking everybody. And then that's a really miserable conversation. We will just end up in tears like oh, it's all about racism and capitalism. What are we supposed to do about that? Yeah, so it's nice to end on this note of there isn't there is a fucking uprising right now of brilliant slut I've only named like two of them but I could name like 90 If we had the time who we're about to take over the world and make the UK slightly again
Adam
right? And your book is the is the is the guide, travel guide for that - future slutty UK…
Beth
if you if you want like a Guide to the Galaxy.
Adam
There you go, God imagine, the galaxy. Well, Beth, thank you so much for taking the time and kind of you know, we've we've we've barely scratched the surface of the book, actually, you know, having just read it. It's I know how broad and deep it is, and, you know, talking for three quarters of an hour, you can only do so much, can't you but I really appreciate it and thank you for writing it. And best of luck with the book. Hopefully you'll be going around and doing talks and everything but yeah, it'll be nice.
Beth
I'll have to stop swearing. Thank you so much for having me.
—
Adam
Thanks for listening to this episode!
Let me know what you think of FREE SEX - the idea or this podcast!
Leave me a review and a star rating if you can!
On social media I’m @adamzmith, yes that’s Smith but with a Z, yeah Zmith, mmm it feels good in the mouth hahah. You can find more Aunt Nell productions on our website auntnell.com and on social we’re @auntnell_.
The theme music is TransLife by Othon
Hosted, produced and edited by Adam Zmith
The Executive Producer for Aunt Nell is Tash Walker
To all you loves and lovers, good night x