1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:01,660 My name is Dr. Henry Boylan. 2 00:00:01,680 --> 00:00:08,460 I am the module coordinator for the Quality and Research Methods Module, which is part of the M.S. in evidence based health care. 3 00:00:08,910 --> 00:00:13,320 And I work in the Centre for Evidence based Medicine at the Department Lecturer, 4 00:00:14,880 --> 00:00:21,240 and this week I have been teaching some very ecclesiastic students, some to talk about policy methods. 5 00:00:21,930 --> 00:00:26,489 And I invited Dr. Holly Flexner here to talk about her research. 6 00:00:26,490 --> 00:00:30,720 And because she takes a particular applied focus, which I think is really interesting, 7 00:00:30,730 --> 00:00:35,070 which I want to sort of help share in our community of researchers. 8 00:00:35,460 --> 00:00:40,980 So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Lewis 1% from Cardinal City University. 9 00:00:41,340 --> 00:00:48,390 And Dr. Rexha's research is about gender and health, and she also set up the Vicki Women's Health, Sex and Pleasure Shop. 10 00:00:49,170 --> 00:00:56,310 And so how many school to talk? I want to remind you, all of this session is being recorded and will be broadcast, 11 00:00:56,550 --> 00:01:03,660 so please bear that in mind during any interactive, for example, I need to thank you. 12 00:01:03,660 --> 00:01:05,910 Thank you, Anne Marie. Thanks so much for having me here. 13 00:01:06,690 --> 00:01:13,620 So today I will be talking about the stigma that continues to surround menstruation, menopause and female pleasure. 14 00:01:13,980 --> 00:01:22,230 And I will be discussing not just how these taboos shape the way we talk, or rather do not talk about girls and women's health and pleasure, 15 00:01:22,560 --> 00:01:29,550 but how these taboos have very real, tangible health consequences for women throughout the life course. 16 00:01:29,760 --> 00:01:32,969 Can everyone hear me okay? Just plays right and I talk. 17 00:01:32,970 --> 00:01:36,390 I can start talking fast. So also raise your hand if I do that. 18 00:01:37,080 --> 00:01:41,309 I'm also, as Anne Marie said, going to be talking about the VQ project, 19 00:01:41,310 --> 00:01:48,690 which is initially an initiative I launched with my colleague at Birmingham City University and her name is Dr. Kelly Abbott. 20 00:01:49,350 --> 00:01:55,620 The V Q is an impact project impact project which seeks to challenge these stigmas by creating 21 00:01:55,620 --> 00:02:01,530 spaces and events geared towards both women's health and sexual agency and pleasure. 22 00:02:02,070 --> 00:02:06,270 But before going further, I should say a few words about how I got to this work. 23 00:02:07,020 --> 00:02:10,299 I was trained as a medical anthropologist at Work University, 24 00:02:10,300 --> 00:02:15,240 or my research was on the gendered care networks of children and young people 25 00:02:15,240 --> 00:02:20,700 in South Africa in the context of economic inequality and the AIDS epidemic. 26 00:02:21,060 --> 00:02:27,450 And one strand of this work was looking at how gossip and shame followed young girls who would 27 00:02:27,450 --> 00:02:33,300 take on relationships with older men or sugar daddies as a means of expanding their networks, 28 00:02:33,540 --> 00:02:39,930 as a means of creating support networks that were essential to get by and have access to food and money and clothes, etc. 29 00:02:40,500 --> 00:02:47,220 And that was the first time that my research had me looking at the gendered double standards in heterosexual relationships. 30 00:02:47,670 --> 00:02:54,810 And then after finishing this work at work and finishing my Ph.D., I got a job at Birmingham City University, 31 00:02:55,560 --> 00:03:01,680 which was where I first started looking at women's experiences of pregnancy while managing epilepsy. 32 00:03:01,680 --> 00:03:02,610 So a bit of a leap. 33 00:03:03,390 --> 00:03:12,810 And then they had me working on a project on women's experiences of endometriosis treatments, which I'll come to use as a case study later on. 34 00:03:13,230 --> 00:03:16,800 And then I did another small study on teens views on sexting. 35 00:03:17,130 --> 00:03:23,790 Again, gender double standards arose and popped up with the way girls face harsher social consequences than boys. 36 00:03:24,810 --> 00:03:28,860 So this patchwork of studies in the general areas of gender, 37 00:03:28,860 --> 00:03:35,610 health and reproductive health and to a lesser degree sexuality, is reflective of the contemporary funding scene, 38 00:03:35,850 --> 00:03:41,370 with US researchers taking a series of projects that are generally in our field but can create a 39 00:03:41,370 --> 00:03:48,840 portfolio of work that is sometimes difficult to hold together as one cohesive body of research. 40 00:03:49,380 --> 00:03:57,240 So that's how I came about to doing this present project as a means of attempting to bring all of this together with a common thread. 41 00:03:57,240 --> 00:04:02,040 I saw not just in this work, but in the field of gender and health and sex at large, 42 00:04:02,400 --> 00:04:06,990 that of the different forms of stigma that follow women throughout their lives, 43 00:04:07,590 --> 00:04:13,560 but also in relation to menstruation, their sexual relationships and pleasure or menopause. 44 00:04:14,160 --> 00:04:17,700 And that there's another strand that holds all of this together. 45 00:04:18,180 --> 00:04:28,889 The image right over my head and I open with this image thinking we should shy away from depictions of subject matter today. 46 00:04:28,890 --> 00:04:32,730 I, of course, don't purposely want to make anyone feel uncomfortable with a subject matter, 47 00:04:33,060 --> 00:04:39,360 but hopefully my hope is actually to have anyone that feels disagrees with seeing these images or 48 00:04:39,360 --> 00:04:44,580 even hearing that word vagina that by the end of the hour you're going to be much more comfortable. 49 00:04:45,450 --> 00:04:49,650 So does anyone know who this piece of art is by or what it is? 50 00:04:51,780 --> 00:04:55,110 Yeah, go ahead. I'm not going to be like star number one. Go ahead. 51 00:04:56,910 --> 00:04:59,910 It is called the Great Wall of vagina for double points if you know the. 52 00:04:59,990 --> 00:05:04,220 Artist. Oh, I can't be there. So this is Jamie McCartney. 53 00:05:04,700 --> 00:05:09,620 It is called The Great Wall of Vagina, but it should technically be the Great Wall of vulva. 54 00:05:10,580 --> 00:05:15,050 If we're going to name the anatomy depicted correctly. 55 00:05:15,620 --> 00:05:21,049 So McCartney went around Britain making casts of different women's vulvas to make a 56 00:05:21,050 --> 00:05:26,300 statement about the negative ways that they often feel about their sexual anatomy, 57 00:05:26,930 --> 00:05:31,580 which is feelings of shame, feelings that they are ugly, feelings that they are unclean. 58 00:05:32,180 --> 00:05:37,489 And McCartney's work tries to combat this by making beautiful pieces of sculpture, 59 00:05:37,490 --> 00:05:43,760 by quite literally recasting, as it were, the vagina and images of the vagina. 60 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:54,410 So let's consider the social and historical roots of all of this and how women's negative views of their own bodies of their own genitals 61 00:05:54,710 --> 00:06:02,210 is an internalisation of the historical and cross-cultural construction of women's bodies as sites of contamination and of pollution. 62 00:06:03,230 --> 00:06:13,010 So focusing on medieval England patriarchal ideologies of the bounded body constructed the female body is all things inverse of the male body, 63 00:06:13,280 --> 00:06:18,440 with the female body as porous, leaky and uncontrollable. 64 00:06:18,710 --> 00:06:24,740 And thus, because of this as monstrous. And today we will see these dualistic constructions. 65 00:06:25,520 --> 00:06:29,420 We still see these dualistic constructions of male and female anatomy, 66 00:06:29,780 --> 00:06:39,290 even though the sheer range of diversity within what is labelled female genitalia and also the diversity within what is labelled male genitalia, 67 00:06:39,500 --> 00:06:44,990 is just as varied as the differences between between those two, between female and male genitalia. 68 00:06:45,290 --> 00:06:53,509 Not to mention the number of people that are born as intersex, which is much larger than people widely know of. 69 00:06:53,510 --> 00:06:58,490 It's one in 60. People are born with genitals that are not strictly male or female. 70 00:06:59,030 --> 00:07:06,920 And for more on this on work in this area that takes on the myth of a strictly binary depiction of human sexual anatomy, 71 00:07:07,370 --> 00:07:11,040 I would see the work of biologists and Fausto Sterling. 72 00:07:15,980 --> 00:07:23,690 We also see these dual isms in the way that female anatomy is portrayed as overly complex and mysterious. 73 00:07:24,320 --> 00:07:28,160 And this is seen as opposites of male sexual anatomy. 74 00:07:28,640 --> 00:07:33,800 The penis, which is seen as straightforward, uncomplicated and easy to navigate. 75 00:07:34,910 --> 00:07:40,890 And turning to the images that I've got on the slide, one depicts a limerick from the 1800s. 76 00:07:41,170 --> 00:07:45,290 The limericks called The Hairy Prospect or the Devil in a Fight. 77 00:07:45,560 --> 00:07:49,190 And it's about the scary, hairy vagina that frightens the devil away. 78 00:07:49,820 --> 00:07:57,590 And the other image is from a contemporary article about the rise of the designer vagina, the Barbie vagina. 79 00:07:57,920 --> 00:08:02,900 And what does the Barbie vagina look like? Interactive moment. 80 00:08:02,930 --> 00:08:06,590 Now, it's completely hairless. 81 00:08:06,830 --> 00:08:11,690 It's smooth, it's unblemished, it's white. The labia isn't long. 82 00:08:12,110 --> 00:08:17,480 It's barely even there. And the clitoris certainly isn't visible immediately. 83 00:08:18,560 --> 00:08:22,280 And it's very much in line with a porn aesthetic of what a vagina should look like. 84 00:08:23,150 --> 00:08:33,060 This long history of douches, of increasing levels of hair removal, and now culminating in the phenomenon of cosmetic surgery called labia blasting. 85 00:08:33,720 --> 00:08:36,800 Do people know what labia plastic is? Everybody? 86 00:08:36,830 --> 00:08:39,710 Yes. I don't need to go into too much detail, 87 00:08:40,820 --> 00:08:50,420 but it's much of this present day pressure to have a perfect designer vagina is rooted in that history of female female genitalia as disgusting, 88 00:08:50,420 --> 00:08:59,180 as monstrous, which in part contributes to the contemporary communication taboos we have around menstruation, menopause and women's sexuality. 89 00:09:02,220 --> 00:09:06,240 So let's first turn to the taboos that surround menstruation. 90 00:09:08,220 --> 00:09:11,340 Abby probably knows the signs here. Do you know who this one is? 91 00:09:12,180 --> 00:09:16,410 Cathy Rupi Kaur. Rupi Kaur. 92 00:09:16,740 --> 00:09:24,000 She's a Canadian. She uploaded this image onto Instagram and Instagram, removed it twice. 93 00:09:25,950 --> 00:09:35,490 And despite Instagram allowing images of of bloodied female bodies from violence, so menstrual blood is seen as obscene. 94 00:09:35,700 --> 00:09:44,850 But blood from violence is sorry. Menstrual blood is seen as obscene, but blood from violence is not seen as obscene in Instagram's guidelines. 95 00:09:45,300 --> 00:09:55,680 But Rupi Kaur, she won in the end, and her work really does help us question why we find the visibility of menstrual blood so offensive. 96 00:09:56,520 --> 00:10:05,130 The work of social anthropologist Mary Douglas takes up menstrual taboos in her 1966 well-known book, Purity and Danger. 97 00:10:05,490 --> 00:10:10,110 And she argues that because menstrual blood is, quote, matter out of place, 98 00:10:10,320 --> 00:10:19,050 it transgresses the boundaries of how we order and classify the world, and thus it's imbued with a symbolic polluting power. 99 00:10:19,650 --> 00:10:29,880 Blood is seen as something associated with physical injury, with disease or dangerous processes such as childbirth, but menstrual blood. 100 00:10:31,530 --> 00:10:35,010 But menstruation is blood associated with none of these things. 101 00:10:35,280 --> 00:10:40,409 And because menstruation is bleeding without injury, it's outside the order of things. 102 00:10:40,410 --> 00:10:45,900 Again, it's matter out of place, thus giving rise to the menstrual taboo. 103 00:10:46,560 --> 00:10:50,879 It should be noted that people have revisited Douglass's work and sort of challenged the 104 00:10:50,880 --> 00:10:55,770 notion that this menstrual taboo is universal across cultures and throughout history. 105 00:10:56,760 --> 00:11:04,650 But here in Britain, to navigate these taboos around periods, we have what Sophie Kathryn Laws has coined menstrual etiquettes. 106 00:11:04,920 --> 00:11:12,630 These etiquettes or these culturally and socially prescribed codes of polite behaviour require a silence around periods, 107 00:11:12,960 --> 00:11:20,580 which means we have communication taboos, not just around the fact of menstruation, but all the accompanying paraphernalia with it. 108 00:11:20,790 --> 00:11:29,700 So pads, tampons, etc. So not only do we have these codes of silence, but girls and women learn that all the sound of sanitary products that we need. 109 00:11:29,880 --> 00:11:33,450 We also must make sure that those are completely invisible and kept hidden. 110 00:11:33,990 --> 00:11:38,129 And one of my favourite stories to illustrate this is a friend telling me about she was 111 00:11:38,130 --> 00:11:42,780 doing a shopping and she had bought some tampons and on the way home her grocery bag split 112 00:11:43,080 --> 00:11:48,270 and everything went all over the ground and a nearby man was really kind and helped pick 113 00:11:48,270 --> 00:11:52,890 her everything up and he picked up a box of tampons and when he realised what he had, 114 00:11:53,040 --> 00:12:03,959 he yelped and threw it in the air. So, so powerful, so powerfully polluting as menstrual blood that even these objects associated with them, 115 00:12:03,960 --> 00:12:11,700 which are merely cardboard and cotton, become infused with so much symbolism that they could be tossed in the air in embarrassment. 116 00:12:12,630 --> 00:12:19,560 So these menstrual advocates, research shows that they're not just followed in more public spaces within schools and within work, 117 00:12:19,920 --> 00:12:23,340 but girls and women even follow them in private spaces. 118 00:12:23,670 --> 00:12:29,640 So they don't talk about their periods with friends necessarily or family members, nor with their intimate partners. 119 00:12:29,910 --> 00:12:35,400 And women report fear that if they break these etiquettes of silence, they'll be the source of shame. 120 00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:38,010 And these fears are often proven true. 121 00:12:38,580 --> 00:12:44,760 Some women state that when they are open about the problems they're having with their periods, they feel shamed by their partners, 122 00:12:45,390 --> 00:12:49,680 that they are made to feel that they're using their periods as an excuse, 123 00:12:49,680 --> 00:12:55,980 an excuse for getting out of things like household chores or that they're being overly dramatic or overly sensitive. 124 00:13:02,780 --> 00:13:07,790 There are some quite severe negative health consequences to these menstrual tickets. 125 00:13:08,150 --> 00:13:13,730 I just want to take up the case study of endometriosis, an area that I have done a bit of research in. 126 00:13:14,150 --> 00:13:22,330 So and the meeting process is a condition where the endometrium or the tissue that normally lines the uterus comes to grow outside of the uterus. 127 00:13:22,340 --> 00:13:28,400 And because of this, the tissue begins to form and build up as it can't be expelled from the body, 128 00:13:29,420 --> 00:13:32,180 which it typically would be in the menstruation cycle. 129 00:13:32,690 --> 00:13:38,090 And the tissue builds up, usually around the fallopian tubes, the ovaries and sometimes around the bowels. 130 00:13:38,390 --> 00:13:47,120 And this can cause extreme pain for some pain that's been documented to be for some women, as painful as a heart attack. 131 00:13:47,450 --> 00:13:55,100 And I've interviewed women who say they've had to repeatedly, once a month, go into the hospital for for morphine because the pain was so bad. 132 00:13:56,930 --> 00:14:05,239 It can also cause excessive menstrual bleeding. That makes it challenging to just take part in day to day life can also for some women, 133 00:14:05,240 --> 00:14:09,410 they have painful intercourse and for some it can lead to infertility. 134 00:14:10,520 --> 00:14:18,650 So 10% of women are thought to have intubate process or a form of endometriosis, which are rates that are equivalent to diabetes. 135 00:14:19,400 --> 00:14:26,360 So it's a very, very common condition. Yet despite how widespread it is, it receives very little research funding. 136 00:14:26,570 --> 00:14:30,890 And the vast majority of people don't even know what endometriosis is. 137 00:14:31,340 --> 00:14:38,209 And because of this, it currently takes women in the UK 7 to 9 years to receive a diagnosis with an 138 00:14:38,210 --> 00:14:45,530 average of 1010 visits to the GP before they get a referral to this to a specialist. 139 00:14:46,160 --> 00:14:55,250 Thus, women have to live what can be with what can be a very crippling condition for nearly a decade before they even receive a diagnosis. 140 00:14:56,270 --> 00:15:04,970 And most women I spoke to regarding their pathway to diagnosis reported that their GP's simply didn't take their symptoms seriously, 141 00:15:05,240 --> 00:15:10,010 that they were told that all women have periods and that all women have period pain. 142 00:15:10,280 --> 00:15:19,609 They felt like they were weren't believed and that they reported that they felt like that they were told that they were making it up, 143 00:15:19,610 --> 00:15:23,630 that it was all in their heads. They felt, in a sense, gaslighted. 144 00:15:24,710 --> 00:15:28,940 And indeed the UK nice guidelines have even recognised this. 145 00:15:29,330 --> 00:15:38,960 The Endometriosis nice guidelines were just recently updated and in them is the recommendation to doctors to literally listen to women. 146 00:15:39,290 --> 00:15:45,170 And I spoke with someone who works for Nice and they told me this is the only condition to their knowledge, 147 00:15:45,770 --> 00:15:55,010 where Nice had ever explicitly made the recommendation to actually listen and to believe patients when they report their symptoms. 148 00:15:59,990 --> 00:16:09,799 So it's often argued that girls and women lack and it's their lack of awareness about menstrual health that causes this delay in diagnosis. 149 00:16:09,800 --> 00:16:16,400 The argument go goes that because they don't know what constitutes a typical or normal period, 150 00:16:16,670 --> 00:16:21,170 they don't know when something's wrong and thus they don't go seek medical help. 151 00:16:21,830 --> 00:16:27,020 However, evidence shows that while this might be part of the delayed diagnosis, 152 00:16:27,380 --> 00:16:35,150 there's also evidence that girls and women simply feel uncomfortable talking about their periods, even with GP's and nurses. 153 00:16:35,460 --> 00:16:43,220 And because of these prevailing menstrual etiquettes. This has been found to be the case in the UK, in Australia and in the United States. 154 00:16:43,700 --> 00:16:52,640 And a planned UK survey just came out showing that half of all teens between the ages of 14 and 21 feel embarrassed about their periods, 155 00:16:53,030 --> 00:16:57,500 making it a real challenge to seek help if they suspect something's wrong. 156 00:16:58,160 --> 00:17:03,440 And I currently have a PhD student are running a teen endometriosis project and she's going 157 00:17:03,440 --> 00:17:09,080 into schools to do surveys asking teens not just about what they know about endometriosis, 158 00:17:09,260 --> 00:17:14,750 but their feelings around menstruation and where best to get supports if they suspect something's wrong. 159 00:17:15,590 --> 00:17:21,650 What research I haven't been able to locate is the comfort level of health professionals themselves in discussing menstruation, 160 00:17:22,220 --> 00:17:23,900 and I'm sure it's out there. I just haven't found it. 161 00:17:25,070 --> 00:17:31,460 And so I'm just wondering for nurses and for GP's if these menstrual etiquettes influence the way 162 00:17:31,490 --> 00:17:37,190 they communicate with patients and how they go about diagnosing conditions related to menstruation. 163 00:17:38,660 --> 00:17:44,630 So going back to that same failure to take women's pain seriously in the case of endometriosis, 164 00:17:44,930 --> 00:17:50,570 this is indicative of the more general gendered gap in health care that we have in the UK. 165 00:17:50,780 --> 00:17:55,700 And the BBC is currently running a fantastic series called The Gendered Health Gap. 166 00:17:56,540 --> 00:18:00,830 One of the recent articles in the series highlight highlighted how women. 167 00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:04,060 Are more likely than men to be told. 168 00:18:04,150 --> 00:18:11,800 Pain or illness is all in their head. And when looking at different cancers and kidney conditions and how men and women are treated differently, 169 00:18:12,040 --> 00:18:16,960 the misdiagnoses of women are believed to have caused thousands of deaths. 170 00:18:17,680 --> 00:18:23,050 And if you want to look more at research on the gendered biases in pain and illness diagnosis, 171 00:18:23,320 --> 00:18:30,220 see Hoffman Hoffman's excellent article, The Girl Who Cried Pain A Bias against Women in the Treatment of Pain. 172 00:18:30,550 --> 00:18:37,030 And Gillian Bendall has also written extensively on the sociology of gender, illness and pain. 173 00:18:40,630 --> 00:18:50,230 All right. So turning now to menopause. So women begin to leave the stage of life when they're supposed to be silent about their periods, 174 00:18:50,230 --> 00:18:54,370 and then they come into a new stage when they encounter a whole new set of etiquettes 175 00:18:54,370 --> 00:18:59,260 of silence around the changes their bodies are going through during menopause. 176 00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:03,100 I'm American. I say menopause. I can't bring myself to say the menopause. 177 00:19:03,370 --> 00:19:11,860 How did I'm so curious about how that came about? First, the image of the menopausal woman already carries a lot of stigma, 178 00:19:12,070 --> 00:19:20,350 and indeed you sometimes hear the term menopausal wielded as a slur to dismiss women who are too old, too loud to rage. 179 00:19:21,310 --> 00:19:25,750 And does anyone remember this front page headline that was in the news? 180 00:19:26,320 --> 00:19:29,890 Right. So the economy and menopause the moment. 181 00:19:30,460 --> 00:19:36,220 So the deputy governor of the Bank of England described the economy, the British economy, as menopausal, 182 00:19:36,460 --> 00:19:42,940 to mean that it's less productive, that it's past its peak, I believe you said, and that it's less potent. 183 00:19:43,300 --> 00:19:51,700 And this definition of menopause. So the definition of menopause is simply the cessation of menstruation and thus to fertility as well. 184 00:19:52,330 --> 00:19:57,370 To see this as women entering a stage that's past their peak or no longer productive 185 00:19:57,640 --> 00:20:03,160 is a view only held if you tie women solely to their capacity to reproduce. 186 00:20:03,490 --> 00:20:12,550 And many women going through menopause came out stating that they see themselves as in their prime and in a highly productive stage of life. 187 00:20:12,910 --> 00:20:20,139 And in the end, the deputy governor did have to come out and apologise for the offensive term and phrasing for the VQ project. 188 00:20:20,140 --> 00:20:24,430 We collaborated with a former police sergeant who works on issues of menopause, 189 00:20:24,730 --> 00:20:29,260 visibility in the workplace, and she argues that while in the workplace, 190 00:20:29,260 --> 00:20:36,310 under the Equality Act, we have accommodations for women during pregnancy and we have accommodations for those with chronic conditions. 191 00:20:36,760 --> 00:20:40,659 We have no policies around menopause and for some women, 192 00:20:40,660 --> 00:20:48,310 but certainly not all the symptoms associated with menopause can be as disruptive, as chronic, as a chronic health condition. 193 00:20:49,240 --> 00:20:52,479 And the silences of menopause are even evident. 194 00:20:52,480 --> 00:20:59,350 And the lack of medical research and innovation in this area area right now, women really only have one recourse. 195 00:20:59,350 --> 00:21:07,600 And that's the hormone replacement theory therapy, a controversial drug that has links to breast cancer and ovarian cancer. 196 00:21:08,170 --> 00:21:16,150 And I was trying to think of an equivalent condition for men around the same age of women going through menopause for comparison. 197 00:21:16,210 --> 00:21:24,010 And all I could really think of is for men who are facing erectile dysfunction and how we have a whole 198 00:21:24,010 --> 00:21:31,450 host of medications to choose from and how much money for research and fund is pumped into this area. 199 00:21:32,770 --> 00:21:38,290 And there are over five mainstream there are five mainstream medications for erectile dysfunction. 200 00:21:38,470 --> 00:21:46,750 And just a month ago, there was announcement that you could start you would soon start seeing Viagra being available over the counter. 201 00:21:49,210 --> 00:21:52,690 If someone can think of a more fair comparison, please let me know. 202 00:21:54,940 --> 00:22:05,979 So now, moving swiftly to taboos around female sexual pleasure, first in Britain, oh, we have communication taboos around sex in general. 203 00:22:05,980 --> 00:22:12,490 And because of this, it means talking about sex in a more open, direct way is simply just not done. 204 00:22:12,490 --> 00:22:16,330 It's not the British way. We must talk about sex indirectly. 205 00:22:17,170 --> 00:22:22,960 We often have to do it through humour or through innuendo. And I'm not arguing that there's something wrong with that. 206 00:22:23,230 --> 00:22:30,969 I'm just showing just showing how it points to the fact that there are tensions around speaking about sex and more frequent, 207 00:22:30,970 --> 00:22:35,260 frank and open and honest ways. And thus we have these communication taboos. 208 00:22:36,310 --> 00:22:41,020 I want to again recognise the work of my colleague Dr. Kelly Abbott, who co-leads the VQ. 209 00:22:41,020 --> 00:22:50,680 With me, Keeley is a critical psychologist who does research with teens and looking at sex and education, sex relationship education, 210 00:22:50,860 --> 00:23:00,580 sorry, and the absence of the recognition of female sexuality in E and much of what I'm going to talk about next comes from her work as. 211 00:23:00,660 --> 00:23:05,460 My background is more in health and she has a much stronger background and sexuality studies. 212 00:23:06,660 --> 00:23:10,530 So female sexuality is shrouded in shame and secrecy. 213 00:23:10,950 --> 00:23:15,810 Despite significant changes in the social landscape over the past three decades, 214 00:23:16,050 --> 00:23:25,410 the sexual double standards still exist where women are judged more harshly than men for engaging in similar sexual behaviours. 215 00:23:25,470 --> 00:23:33,210 So just for example, women continue to face more negative judgement than men when they are known to engage in casual sex. 216 00:23:33,990 --> 00:23:40,920 Although sexuality is now orga organised around pleasure and no longer just around reproduction, 217 00:23:41,280 --> 00:23:46,500 male sexuality is still presented as the opposite of female sexuality. 218 00:23:46,860 --> 00:23:56,999 That male sexuality is active. It's driven by strong biological needs for coital sex, while female sexuality is constructed as passive, 219 00:23:57,000 --> 00:24:01,890 as responsive to men's sexual needs and closely connected to reproduction. 220 00:24:02,970 --> 00:24:10,140 Women have been constructed as less naturally sexual than men, which is often characterised by an absence of desire. 221 00:24:10,860 --> 00:24:19,739 And indeed, researchers have documented either the complete absence of expressed desire or of a whispered expression of desire. 222 00:24:19,740 --> 00:24:28,560 Among young women, where talk of desire does emerge, it is often related to male needs, bodies and desires. 223 00:24:29,280 --> 00:24:35,730 And there are few spaces where women can discuss their sexual desire without being some threat, 224 00:24:35,910 --> 00:24:39,900 without being some threat of danger that is held over them. 225 00:24:40,200 --> 00:24:47,489 Over the last decade, researchers have begun to document changes in women's sexual desire over the life span and have 226 00:24:47,490 --> 00:24:53,520 identified accounts of sexual desire that challenge dominant discourses of women's sexuality. 227 00:24:53,820 --> 00:25:00,809 An online blogs and forums are thought to be places where women can develop vocabularies of sexual 228 00:25:00,810 --> 00:25:06,780 desire with reduced shame around sex and build communities to share experiences and information. 229 00:25:07,680 --> 00:25:15,060 And here's a photo from the project with portraits of women before, during and after having an orgasm. 230 00:25:15,420 --> 00:25:23,370 And the project seeks to challenge stigma around women's sexuality, in part by acknowledging the fact that just like men, 231 00:25:23,370 --> 00:25:29,160 women masturbate, and in recognising this, it seeks to normalise female pleasure. 232 00:25:31,140 --> 00:25:39,960 So all of this has very real consequences for women's sexual well-being, as it's linked to what's been dubbed as the orgasm gap. 233 00:25:40,800 --> 00:25:48,780 And there's a noticeable gap with men reporting experiencing orgasm during sexual activity much more frequently than women. 234 00:25:49,470 --> 00:25:53,220 There's a host of research that shows this. 235 00:25:53,550 --> 00:25:59,100 The latest research was just published this past January in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 236 00:25:59,370 --> 00:26:02,910 Looking at a sample of over 50,000 adults in the US. 237 00:26:03,120 --> 00:26:08,549 The survey found that heterosexual men were the most likely to report that they 238 00:26:08,550 --> 00:26:15,030 usually always experience an orgasm when sexually intimate and 95% reported that. 239 00:26:15,570 --> 00:26:26,400 Then next it was gay. Men are 89% bisexual men at 88%, followed by lesbians, lesbian women at 86%. 240 00:26:27,360 --> 00:26:34,410 And then you see a real dip with bisexual women reporting only achieving orgasm 66% of the time. 241 00:26:34,650 --> 00:26:38,670 And then at the very bottom are heterosexual women at 65%. 242 00:26:39,450 --> 00:26:49,190 So we have a gendering around orgasm, and we can often see this gendering of the orgasm in the media as well, especially in mainstream magazines. 243 00:26:49,200 --> 00:26:56,430 The sheer amount of articles and magazines that are dedicated to helping women achieve the elusive female orgasm 244 00:26:56,490 --> 00:27:04,260 suggest that people believe that the female orgasm is far more challenging to achieve and attain than the male orgasm. 245 00:27:04,860 --> 00:27:13,950 But when you ask women about orgasms, they often report its importance in relation to men and giving male partners pleasure and orgasm, 246 00:27:14,310 --> 00:27:17,790 possibly at the expense of their own pleasure and the orgasm. 247 00:27:17,790 --> 00:27:23,280 And it's often idealised as romantic, sexual highpoint and symbol of femininity. 248 00:27:23,550 --> 00:27:27,960 Therefore, the absence of orgasm has been identified as troubling for women, 249 00:27:28,260 --> 00:27:37,170 now negatively affecting a woman's self-image and her emotional and relational well-being, as well as her sexual experiences and enjoyment. 250 00:27:37,440 --> 00:27:44,520 And in the end, women can come to internalise this and believe the inability to orgasm is something that's wrong with them. 251 00:27:44,730 --> 00:27:49,770 So we're talking about the taboos and stigma that surrounds menstruation, menopause and female sexuality. 252 00:27:50,310 --> 00:27:55,860 And each one of these could just have taken up the entire lecture. So I've only got to touch on each very, very lightly. 253 00:27:56,580 --> 00:28:00,140 But now I want to move to discussing how it came about during the VQ. 254 00:28:00,420 --> 00:28:09,480 Ject and the VQ project very much sits within the current political climate and the current moment of a resurgent popular feminism. 255 00:28:10,200 --> 00:28:16,050 And I've been talking about the still present pervasive menstruation taboos we have here in Britain, 256 00:28:16,350 --> 00:28:20,100 but there's also a growing movement led by young women and teens, 257 00:28:20,340 --> 00:28:25,649 a movement that is bringing awareness to period poverty and to the call to end the tampon 258 00:28:25,650 --> 00:28:32,010 tax and the need for sanitary products that are both safe and environmentally friendly. 259 00:28:32,370 --> 00:28:38,909 At the forefront of the this movement is the bloody good period project, their images up there in the corner and there's many, 260 00:28:38,910 --> 00:28:45,629 many other related campaigns like the homeless period and we don't bleed blue and it's becoming more and more 261 00:28:45,630 --> 00:28:52,140 popular to the point that even the Girl Guides have introduced a period poverty badge that you can get. 262 00:28:53,280 --> 00:28:57,239 So in relation to menopause, we have there's a movement called the Menopause Cafe, 263 00:28:57,240 --> 00:29:03,630 which organises cafes across the country where women can come and talk about their experiences of menopause and share information. 264 00:29:03,930 --> 00:29:13,410 But in comparison to the action that we're seeing around periods, this is there's the campaigning around menopause is relatively small. 265 00:29:15,600 --> 00:29:18,960 And then we can see political action around women's sexuality. 266 00:29:19,350 --> 00:29:26,940 It has a history from the seventies and there's this great book that pass around by Lynne Carmela called Vibrator Nation. 267 00:29:28,380 --> 00:29:32,340 And the feminist sex shop originates in the States. 268 00:29:32,340 --> 00:29:39,240 And you still have there's at least 20 in the States and maybe at least ten that I can think of in Canada. 269 00:29:40,890 --> 00:29:45,420 And these are spaces that they don't just sell sex toys. 270 00:29:45,900 --> 00:29:56,010 There are sites of education with the explicit goal of liberation, with sex toys as the tools of sexual and feminist liberation, as it were. 271 00:29:56,610 --> 00:30:05,000 And up here, here's a pick from Shush. Shush is the only female owned bricks and mortar sex shop in the UK. 272 00:30:05,010 --> 00:30:09,180 It's. And it's the longest running one and I'll talk more about shush in a moment. 273 00:30:09,990 --> 00:30:15,900 Also here in the picture is the Women's March with a sea of pussy pink pussy hats. 274 00:30:16,230 --> 00:30:17,190 And this, of course, 275 00:30:17,190 --> 00:30:25,350 was a direct rallying call around Trump's statement that he could grab women by their genitals without their consent and without consequence. 276 00:30:25,980 --> 00:30:30,150 And this is all within the context of the present MeToo movement. 277 00:30:30,630 --> 00:30:35,130 And those researchers who work in the area of pleasure argue that what's been missing in 278 00:30:35,130 --> 00:30:40,110 these conversations that fortunately we're finally having about sex and about consent. 279 00:30:40,590 --> 00:30:47,700 But what's missing from these conversations is the role of female sexual agency and of centring female pleasure, 280 00:30:47,880 --> 00:30:56,010 and what that would mean for creating a culture with more egalitarian, mutually respectful and safer sexual relationships. 281 00:30:57,900 --> 00:31:09,240 So. VQ So this has been I mean, I'm an academic for the past well, since 2007, starting with a Ph.D. till now, so a decade. 282 00:31:09,510 --> 00:31:15,090 And now we've got this new venture where we're trying to be very public facing and and do this impact project. 283 00:31:16,380 --> 00:31:21,450 So we've got a logo made up. So the VQ vaginal intelligence, right? 284 00:31:22,140 --> 00:31:25,200 We've got peach. That's a peach, not a nectarine. 285 00:31:26,460 --> 00:31:36,090 So the goal of the VQ is to create these sex positive feminist intersectional spaces, a pop up shop, as it were. 286 00:31:37,170 --> 00:31:45,540 And we invite female led social enterprises related to all things women's health, sex and pleasure to the space. 287 00:31:46,230 --> 00:31:57,540 And we got funding from Steam to do this about £5,000 to start with and steam with especially with the element of innovation, 288 00:31:57,750 --> 00:32:07,049 what we're hoping for in the future, as is to look at innovations within the industry around sanitary products, 289 00:32:07,050 --> 00:32:17,220 which hasn't had very much innovation for a very long time around sexual aids aimed at women and of course, around menopause and other elements. 290 00:32:19,750 --> 00:32:27,150 Let's see. So we the first one we've run one pop up so far this past March. 291 00:32:28,830 --> 00:32:33,240 And we invited chefs. They came. They were our headliners. 292 00:32:33,690 --> 00:32:38,910 That's Rachel here from Shush with her little vagina vulva that she used to demonstrate. 293 00:32:39,780 --> 00:32:43,530 She had a very popular booth. This is Gemma, who helped out. 294 00:32:43,530 --> 00:32:48,510 Here's Chely Wright here. This is Ruby from Ruka period pants. 295 00:32:48,630 --> 00:32:54,209 So she started have you ever heard of period that's their maid thinks is the American 296 00:32:54,210 --> 00:33:00,210 brand and Ruby started up and they've just come off the manufacturing lines. 297 00:33:00,510 --> 00:33:07,590 So if you want to see one, there's one. I'll pass it. If you don't just throw it up in the air and scream like the mascot of the tampon. 298 00:33:09,300 --> 00:33:15,780 And then so those are there. And then these came from precious stars. 299 00:33:15,780 --> 00:33:23,430 These are reusable pads. And this is the little thing that you wash them in, so I'll pass that around too. 300 00:33:27,030 --> 00:33:29,280 So that's Bryony Farmer. 301 00:33:29,280 --> 00:33:37,290 She's on YouTube and creates these fantastic YouTube videos around menstruation and menstrual health, especially for young women. 302 00:33:37,290 --> 00:33:41,729 I show them to my daughter. It's been immensely helpful. Her, I forgot her name. 303 00:33:41,730 --> 00:33:49,250 She came last minute to represent Umbrella Sexual Health Network, which is the biggest sexual health clinic in Birmingham and in the West Midlands. 304 00:33:49,590 --> 00:33:54,420 And this is Linda Bailey, the police sergeant that does work around menopause. 305 00:33:56,850 --> 00:34:06,509 And so on the day we had all these people who are here selling their products, much that could be ordered online after they could see them in person. 306 00:34:06,510 --> 00:34:12,360 So you could actually talk to the people and actually see the products and just have these really great engaging conversations. 307 00:34:12,540 --> 00:34:18,750 And then we had a workshop in the evening also there was Kay Winwood, an artist because of Steam. 308 00:34:19,260 --> 00:34:23,430 You have, what is it? Science, technology, engineering, arts. 309 00:34:23,430 --> 00:34:28,680 And so Kate K was our arts and she came and she does art projects around female pleasure. 310 00:34:28,680 --> 00:34:37,290 So she was there doing these very interesting moulds and there was our little sign we took 311 00:34:37,290 --> 00:34:41,760 over a shop in a place called the Great Western Arcade that had a lot of foot traffic. 312 00:34:41,970 --> 00:34:45,209 And the university, of course, they want to save money. They want to do it on campus. 313 00:34:45,210 --> 00:34:49,650 And we're like, No, this is an impact project. We need to go out into the public. 314 00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:55,590 So those were all the great we had like an amazing group of people. 315 00:34:56,130 --> 00:35:00,110 We had at least 200 women through the door on the day, men and women. 316 00:35:02,490 --> 00:35:06,390 Men wouldn't usually come in on their own, a little bit too shy to do that. 317 00:35:07,650 --> 00:35:15,450 On the day there was a real diversity of women of was really representative of Birmingham and ages. 318 00:35:15,450 --> 00:35:21,480 There was a woman in her eighties that came in because she had heard us on the radio and she was suffering from incontinence. 319 00:35:21,690 --> 00:35:27,090 And so Ruby actually sent her some free walker period pants. 320 00:35:27,240 --> 00:35:32,190 And now they're going to start exploring. Can we use can we come up with other products and other uses for these? 321 00:35:32,190 --> 00:35:40,620 And Linda and Ruby are continuing to talk to find out if a period pants are something that could be used for for incontinence. 322 00:35:40,890 --> 00:35:44,160 So all that kind of synergy that's happening was was really amazing. 323 00:35:45,990 --> 00:35:49,770 Let's see. So we've got lots of positive feedback. 324 00:35:49,770 --> 00:35:55,649 We've got a Facebook page and like the things that we really like to hear where it was fun. 325 00:35:55,650 --> 00:36:02,100 We were trying to not make this overly serious, but it was that you learn something and that you were made to feel comfortable, 326 00:36:02,100 --> 00:36:05,670 that it wasn't like a lot of women were just it was trying to get people through the door. 327 00:36:05,700 --> 00:36:10,920 That was really hard. They had all these notions of what it was going to be like, and if we could just get them through the door, 328 00:36:10,950 --> 00:36:15,960 they could just see it was just very non-threatening, very warm, very welcoming. 329 00:36:17,040 --> 00:36:25,169 And the criticisms, of course, were we just started preaching to the choir that we're attracting women that are mostly, 330 00:36:25,170 --> 00:36:29,970 by and large, already comfortable talking about this stuff. And to a degree that was true. 331 00:36:30,240 --> 00:36:36,450 But luckily, being in the Great Western Arcade, lots of people just pop their head in to find out what it was, 332 00:36:36,450 --> 00:36:39,660 what was going on, and we're hopefully pleasantly surprised. 333 00:36:41,670 --> 00:36:47,130 And the other thing, we had tried to be intersectional and diverse from the beginning, 334 00:36:47,490 --> 00:36:58,290 and we had invited people from a group called SUNO in Birmingham that does work around disabilities and sexualities, and they weren't able to come. 335 00:36:58,620 --> 00:37:07,379 And then we were working with the LGBT centre that had a well women clinic, and the person that was going to come to represent them couldn't make it. 336 00:37:07,380 --> 00:37:11,790 In the end, they'd gotten sick and there was nobody else that could replace them. 337 00:37:12,120 --> 00:37:16,409 And then we were trying to get cis sisters to come that does stuff around endometriosis, 338 00:37:16,410 --> 00:37:20,970 PCOS for the Afro-Caribbean community in Birmingham and making it come in the end. 339 00:37:21,390 --> 00:37:26,700 And so what that points to is that the organisations working with more marginalised groups, 340 00:37:27,150 --> 00:37:30,960 it's they don't have the resources, they don't have the people that can actually show up on the day. 341 00:37:31,140 --> 00:37:37,140 So we have to think like we can find representatives to come and to help, 342 00:37:37,590 --> 00:37:41,490 to help that these events be more diverse, to be more reflective of the community. 343 00:37:41,820 --> 00:37:49,380 But if those organisations don't have the resources, we need to come up with some solutions for that. 344 00:37:51,640 --> 00:38:00,060 Let's see some of the other feedback. When I was pushing mates to try to get their mates to come and hearing like why we want to. 345 00:38:00,620 --> 00:38:05,310 It was theirs. Why would you play it? Menstruation and menopause and sex all in the same place. 346 00:38:05,330 --> 00:38:08,150 Why would you do that? Like that? They're just different things. Why would they do that? 347 00:38:08,390 --> 00:38:14,240 And the reason we were doing that is we were trying to play sex and women's pleasure 348 00:38:14,510 --> 00:38:19,610 on the spectrum of women's health and well-being to try to destigmatize it in a way. 349 00:38:22,730 --> 00:38:27,500 But now we're kind of I'd say at the end, what we're doing, we're doing more events are a bit separate. 350 00:38:27,500 --> 00:38:33,400 So I'll talk about the next events that we're going to do, the media coverage. 351 00:38:33,410 --> 00:38:38,660 We thought we were going to get lots of coverage. We didn't. So we thought The Guardian's going to love this. 352 00:38:38,660 --> 00:38:46,040 It's going to eat this up. No, no, no. So we got only really Birmingham based and it was really sensationalist. 353 00:38:46,310 --> 00:38:52,040 So like one says, X marks the spot and they really just focussed on the sex element and then they threw in 354 00:38:52,040 --> 00:38:59,300 these images of a sex robot and a woman in lingerie and we purposely a lot of sex shops like, 355 00:38:59,600 --> 00:39:04,910 like Ann Summers. The reason the way sex shops work is 30% of your product can be sexual aids. 356 00:39:05,180 --> 00:39:09,290 The rest has to be non-sexual aids so that you don't have to have a special licence 357 00:39:09,290 --> 00:39:13,129 because these licences for a sex shop in adult shops are extremely expensive. 358 00:39:13,130 --> 00:39:14,510 They're like five grand a year. 359 00:39:15,110 --> 00:39:24,290 So the way you get around it is by selling lingerie, but that's about a male gaze and a male perspective of sex or like male centred view on sex. 360 00:39:24,500 --> 00:39:30,319 Where we did not want to do that. So the other products that we had were around again, 361 00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:36,139 menstruation and menopause and then umbrella sexual health clinic had chlamydia tests and condoms 362 00:39:36,140 --> 00:39:40,820 and the last dental dams that were available in the UK that are no longer funded by the NHS. 363 00:39:42,620 --> 00:39:44,330 So yeah, so we weren't really thrilled with that. 364 00:39:45,290 --> 00:39:53,060 And then we only got one complaint at the university from a staff that thought the university should not be promoting female pleasure. 365 00:39:53,270 --> 00:40:01,190 But luckily the V-c just laughed that one off. And we do get some trolling on Facebook and social media. 366 00:40:01,190 --> 00:40:06,950 So, you know, when they're really pushing out for academics to do impact work, to be out there to engage with the public. 367 00:40:07,130 --> 00:40:11,720 But you also have to think about the subject matter is and if you're if you're a 368 00:40:11,720 --> 00:40:16,250 female researcher and you've dared to put even the name doctor in front of your name, 369 00:40:16,490 --> 00:40:20,120 the kind of backlash that we can see on social media because of that. 370 00:40:20,120 --> 00:40:25,609 So we do face some of that the next thing, so the next thing. 371 00:40:25,610 --> 00:40:34,429 So for the next events, we're going to do another pop up shop before the end of the year, but we're going to do a couple of events that are separate. 372 00:40:34,430 --> 00:40:36,290 So we're going to do a Menopause Café. 373 00:40:37,190 --> 00:40:46,340 We're going to do a history of menstruation day and then also help women learn how to make reusable sanitary towels. 374 00:40:48,230 --> 00:40:52,040 And I'm going to do some research with these entrepreneurs. 375 00:40:52,040 --> 00:40:58,040 I can't think of a name to that brings them all together. There's a name it says Vegan Event Badge Economics. 376 00:40:58,280 --> 00:41:07,220 So I was wondering if could do badge entrepreneurs. But all these women at the forefront of of of this industry want to interview them. 377 00:41:08,030 --> 00:41:16,009 And we've put in a bid to do a year long shop and we'll hear soon if we're going to get it. 378 00:41:16,010 --> 00:41:18,920 And it's looking pretty good, actually. 379 00:41:19,610 --> 00:41:25,790 And the next event, this is the one that I can't even advertise at the university because I did too embarrassed. 380 00:41:26,570 --> 00:41:29,629 It's called Bean Flix and we're doing it. 381 00:41:29,630 --> 00:41:35,150 It's a feminist porn night. So we've got an academic named Dr. Lucy Neville. 382 00:41:35,150 --> 00:41:43,910 She's coming in to talk about her research. She just wrote a book about the phenomenon of women watching and producing gay male porn. 383 00:41:44,570 --> 00:41:48,110 We've got Mistress Tatiana, a dominatrix and academic. 384 00:41:48,170 --> 00:41:53,920 She's going to come and talk to us. Gillian Leno does stuff around disabilities and sexuality. 385 00:41:53,930 --> 00:42:00,169 She's going to come and Kaiser Rose does stuff around black queer identities. 386 00:42:00,170 --> 00:42:06,200 She's going to come as well. And then after those talks, we're going to actually run a whole bunch of feminist porn. 387 00:42:06,200 --> 00:42:10,850 And I've had to do this at my university. It's been it's been very interesting. 388 00:42:11,810 --> 00:42:15,050 So actually, yeah, I'm kind of I'm looking forward to not doing too much of it. 389 00:42:15,100 --> 00:42:22,870 As fun as this is. And it's pushing the boundaries which we need to do is I'm also kind of looking forward to doing the safer stuff next. 390 00:42:23,330 --> 00:42:27,050 So that's it. That's it for me as I look.