My name is Dr. Henry Boylan.
I am the module coordinator for the Quality and Research Methods Module, which is part of the M.S. in evidence based health care.
And I work in the Centre for Evidence based Medicine at the Department Lecturer,
and this week I have been teaching some very ecclesiastic students, some to talk about policy methods.
And I invited Dr. Holly Flexner here to talk about her research.
And because she takes a particular applied focus, which I think is really interesting,
which I want to sort of help share in our community of researchers.
So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Lewis 1% from Cardinal City University.
And Dr. Rexha's research is about gender and health, and she also set up the Vicki Women's Health, Sex and Pleasure Shop.
And so how many school to talk? I want to remind you, all of this session is being recorded and will be broadcast,
so please bear that in mind during any interactive, for example, I need to thank you.
Thank you, Anne Marie. Thanks so much for having me here.
So today I will be talking about the stigma that continues to surround menstruation, menopause and female pleasure.
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,
but how these taboos have very real, tangible health consequences for women throughout the life course.
Can everyone hear me okay? Just plays right and I talk.
I can start talking fast. So also raise your hand if I do that.
I'm also, as Anne Marie said, going to be talking about the VQ project,
which is initially an initiative I launched with my colleague at Birmingham City University and her name is Dr. Kelly Abbott.
The V Q is an impact project impact project which seeks to challenge these stigmas by creating
spaces and events geared towards both women's health and sexual agency and pleasure.
But before going further, I should say a few words about how I got to this work.
I was trained as a medical anthropologist at Work University,
or my research was on the gendered care networks of children and young people
in South Africa in the context of economic inequality and the AIDS epidemic.
And one strand of this work was looking at how gossip and shame followed young girls who would
take on relationships with older men or sugar daddies as a means of expanding their networks,
as a means of creating support networks that were essential to get by and have access to food and money and clothes, etc.
And that was the first time that my research had me looking at the gendered double standards in heterosexual relationships.
And then after finishing this work at work and finishing my Ph.D., I got a job at Birmingham City University,
which was where I first started looking at women's experiences of pregnancy while managing epilepsy.
So a bit of a leap.
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.
And then I did another small study on teens views on sexting.
Again, gender double standards arose and popped up with the way girls face harsher social consequences than boys.
So this patchwork of studies in the general areas of gender,
health and reproductive health and to a lesser degree sexuality, is reflective of the contemporary funding scene,
with US researchers taking a series of projects that are generally in our field but can create a
portfolio of work that is sometimes difficult to hold together as one cohesive body of research.
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.
I saw not just in this work, but in the field of gender and health and sex at large,
that of the different forms of stigma that follow women throughout their lives,
but also in relation to menstruation, their sexual relationships and pleasure or menopause.
And that there's another strand that holds all of this together.
The image right over my head and I open with this image thinking we should shy away from depictions of subject matter today.
I, of course, don't purposely want to make anyone feel uncomfortable with a subject matter,
but hopefully my hope is actually to have anyone that feels disagrees with seeing these images or
even hearing that word vagina that by the end of the hour you're going to be much more comfortable.
So does anyone know who this piece of art is by or what it is?
Yeah, go ahead. I'm not going to be like star number one. Go ahead.
It is called the Great Wall of vagina for double points if you know the.
Artist. Oh, I can't be there. So this is Jamie McCartney.
It is called The Great Wall of Vagina, but it should technically be the Great Wall of vulva.
If we're going to name the anatomy depicted correctly.
So McCartney went around Britain making casts of different women's vulvas to make a
statement about the negative ways that they often feel about their sexual anatomy,
which is feelings of shame, feelings that they are ugly, feelings that they are unclean.
And McCartney's work tries to combat this by making beautiful pieces of sculpture,
by quite literally recasting, as it were, the vagina and images of the vagina.
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
is an internalisation of the historical and cross-cultural construction of women's bodies as sites of contamination and of pollution.
So focusing on medieval England patriarchal ideologies of the bounded body constructed the female body is all things inverse of the male body,
with the female body as porous, leaky and uncontrollable.
And thus, because of this as monstrous. And today we will see these dualistic constructions.
We still see these dualistic constructions of male and female anatomy,
even though the sheer range of diversity within what is labelled female genitalia and also the diversity within what is labelled male genitalia,
is just as varied as the differences between between those two, between female and male genitalia.
Not to mention the number of people that are born as intersex, which is much larger than people widely know of.
It's one in 60. People are born with genitals that are not strictly male or female.
And for more on this on work in this area that takes on the myth of a strictly binary depiction of human sexual anatomy,
I would see the work of biologists and Fausto Sterling.
We also see these dual isms in the way that female anatomy is portrayed as overly complex and mysterious.
And this is seen as opposites of male sexual anatomy.
The penis, which is seen as straightforward, uncomplicated and easy to navigate.
And turning to the images that I've got on the slide, one depicts a limerick from the 1800s.
The limericks called The Hairy Prospect or the Devil in a Fight.
And it's about the scary, hairy vagina that frightens the devil away.
And the other image is from a contemporary article about the rise of the designer vagina, the Barbie vagina.
And what does the Barbie vagina look like? Interactive moment.
Now, it's completely hairless.
It's smooth, it's unblemished, it's white. The labia isn't long.
It's barely even there. And the clitoris certainly isn't visible immediately.
And it's very much in line with a porn aesthetic of what a vagina should look like.
This long history of douches, of increasing levels of hair removal, and now culminating in the phenomenon of cosmetic surgery called labia blasting.
Do people know what labia plastic is? Everybody?
Yes. I don't need to go into too much detail,
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,
as monstrous, which in part contributes to the contemporary communication taboos we have around menstruation, menopause and women's sexuality.
So let's first turn to the taboos that surround menstruation.
Abby probably knows the signs here. Do you know who this one is?
Cathy Rupi Kaur. Rupi Kaur.
She's a Canadian. She uploaded this image onto Instagram and Instagram, removed it twice.
And despite Instagram allowing images of of bloodied female bodies from violence, so menstrual blood is seen as obscene.
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.
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.
The work of social anthropologist Mary Douglas takes up menstrual taboos in her 1966 well-known book, Purity and Danger.
And she argues that because menstrual blood is, quote, matter out of place,
it transgresses the boundaries of how we order and classify the world, and thus it's imbued with a symbolic polluting power.
Blood is seen as something associated with physical injury, with disease or dangerous processes such as childbirth, but menstrual blood.
But menstruation is blood associated with none of these things.
And because menstruation is bleeding without injury, it's outside the order of things.
Again, it's matter out of place, thus giving rise to the menstrual taboo.
It should be noted that people have revisited Douglass's work and sort of challenged the
notion that this menstrual taboo is universal across cultures and throughout history.
But here in Britain, to navigate these taboos around periods, we have what Sophie Kathryn Laws has coined menstrual etiquettes.
These etiquettes or these culturally and socially prescribed codes of polite behaviour require a silence around periods,
which means we have communication taboos, not just around the fact of menstruation, but all the accompanying paraphernalia with it.
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.
We also must make sure that those are completely invisible and kept hidden.
And one of my favourite stories to illustrate this is a friend telling me about she was
doing a shopping and she had bought some tampons and on the way home her grocery bag split
and everything went all over the ground and a nearby man was really kind and helped pick
her everything up and he picked up a box of tampons and when he realised what he had,
he yelped and threw it in the air. So, so powerful, so powerfully polluting as menstrual blood that even these objects associated with them,
which are merely cardboard and cotton, become infused with so much symbolism that they could be tossed in the air in embarrassment.
So these menstrual advocates, research shows that they're not just followed in more public spaces within schools and within work,
but girls and women even follow them in private spaces.
So they don't talk about their periods with friends necessarily or family members, nor with their intimate partners.
And women report fear that if they break these etiquettes of silence, they'll be the source of shame.
And these fears are often proven true.
Some women state that when they are open about the problems they're having with their periods, they feel shamed by their partners,
that they are made to feel that they're using their periods as an excuse,
an excuse for getting out of things like household chores or that they're being overly dramatic or overly sensitive.
There are some quite severe negative health consequences to these menstrual tickets.
I just want to take up the case study of endometriosis, an area that I have done a bit of research in.
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.
And because of this, the tissue begins to form and build up as it can't be expelled from the body,
which it typically would be in the menstruation cycle.
And the tissue builds up, usually around the fallopian tubes, the ovaries and sometimes around the bowels.
And this can cause extreme pain for some pain that's been documented to be for some women, as painful as a heart attack.
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.
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,
they have painful intercourse and for some it can lead to infertility.
So 10% of women are thought to have intubate process or a form of endometriosis, which are rates that are equivalent to diabetes.
So it's a very, very common condition. Yet despite how widespread it is, it receives very little research funding.
And the vast majority of people don't even know what endometriosis is.
And because of this, it currently takes women in the UK 7 to 9 years to receive a diagnosis with an
average of 1010 visits to the GP before they get a referral to this to a specialist.
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.
And most women I spoke to regarding their pathway to diagnosis reported that their GP's simply didn't take their symptoms seriously,
that they were told that all women have periods and that all women have period pain.
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,
that it was all in their heads. They felt, in a sense, gaslighted.
And indeed the UK nice guidelines have even recognised this.
The Endometriosis nice guidelines were just recently updated and in them is the recommendation to doctors to literally listen to women.
And I spoke with someone who works for Nice and they told me this is the only condition to their knowledge,
where Nice had ever explicitly made the recommendation to actually listen and to believe patients when they report their symptoms.
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.
The argument go goes that because they don't know what constitutes a typical or normal period,
they don't know when something's wrong and thus they don't go seek medical help.
However, evidence shows that while this might be part of the delayed diagnosis,
there's also evidence that girls and women simply feel uncomfortable talking about their periods, even with GP's and nurses.
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.
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,
making it a real challenge to seek help if they suspect something's wrong.
And I currently have a PhD student are running a teen endometriosis project and she's going
into schools to do surveys asking teens not just about what they know about endometriosis,
but their feelings around menstruation and where best to get supports if they suspect something's wrong.
What research I haven't been able to locate is the comfort level of health professionals themselves in discussing menstruation,
and I'm sure it's out there. I just haven't found it.
And so I'm just wondering for nurses and for GP's if these menstrual etiquettes influence the way
they communicate with patients and how they go about diagnosing conditions related to menstruation.
So going back to that same failure to take women's pain seriously in the case of endometriosis,
this is indicative of the more general gendered gap in health care that we have in the UK.
And the BBC is currently running a fantastic series called The Gendered Health Gap.
One of the recent articles in the series highlight highlighted how women.
Are more likely than men to be told.
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,
the misdiagnoses of women are believed to have caused thousands of deaths.
And if you want to look more at research on the gendered biases in pain and illness diagnosis,
see Hoffman Hoffman's excellent article, The Girl Who Cried Pain A Bias against Women in the Treatment of Pain.
And Gillian Bendall has also written extensively on the sociology of gender, illness and pain.
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,
and then they come into a new stage when they encounter a whole new set of etiquettes
of silence around the changes their bodies are going through during menopause.
I'm American. I say menopause. I can't bring myself to say the menopause.
How did I'm so curious about how that came about? First, the image of the menopausal woman already carries a lot of stigma,
and indeed you sometimes hear the term menopausal wielded as a slur to dismiss women who are too old, too loud to rage.
And does anyone remember this front page headline that was in the news?
Right. So the economy and menopause the moment.
So the deputy governor of the Bank of England described the economy, the British economy, as menopausal,
to mean that it's less productive, that it's past its peak, I believe you said, and that it's less potent.
And this definition of menopause. So the definition of menopause is simply the cessation of menstruation and thus to fertility as well.
To see this as women entering a stage that's past their peak or no longer productive
is a view only held if you tie women solely to their capacity to reproduce.
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.
And in the end, the deputy governor did have to come out and apologise for the offensive term and phrasing for the VQ project.
We collaborated with a former police sergeant who works on issues of menopause,
visibility in the workplace, and she argues that while in the workplace,
under the Equality Act, we have accommodations for women during pregnancy and we have accommodations for those with chronic conditions.
We have no policies around menopause and for some women,
but certainly not all the symptoms associated with menopause can be as disruptive, as chronic, as a chronic health condition.
And the silences of menopause are even evident.
And the lack of medical research and innovation in this area area right now, women really only have one recourse.
And that's the hormone replacement theory therapy, a controversial drug that has links to breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
And I was trying to think of an equivalent condition for men around the same age of women going through menopause for comparison.
And all I could really think of is for men who are facing erectile dysfunction and how we have a whole
host of medications to choose from and how much money for research and fund is pumped into this area.
And there are over five mainstream there are five mainstream medications for erectile dysfunction.
And just a month ago, there was announcement that you could start you would soon start seeing Viagra being available over the counter.
If someone can think of a more fair comparison, please let me know.
So now, moving swiftly to taboos around female sexual pleasure, first in Britain, oh, we have communication taboos around sex in general.
And because of this, it means talking about sex in a more open, direct way is simply just not done.
It's not the British way. We must talk about sex indirectly.
We often have to do it through humour or through innuendo. And I'm not arguing that there's something wrong with that.
I'm just showing just showing how it points to the fact that there are tensions around speaking about sex and more frequent,
frank and open and honest ways. And thus we have these communication taboos.
I want to again recognise the work of my colleague Dr. Kelly Abbott, who co-leads the VQ.
With me, Keeley is a critical psychologist who does research with teens and looking at sex and education, sex relationship education,
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.
My background is more in health and she has a much stronger background and sexuality studies.
So female sexuality is shrouded in shame and secrecy.
Despite significant changes in the social landscape over the past three decades,
the sexual double standards still exist where women are judged more harshly than men for engaging in similar sexual behaviours.
So just for example, women continue to face more negative judgement than men when they are known to engage in casual sex.
Although sexuality is now orga organised around pleasure and no longer just around reproduction,
male sexuality is still presented as the opposite of female sexuality.
That male sexuality is active. It's driven by strong biological needs for coital sex, while female sexuality is constructed as passive,
as responsive to men's sexual needs and closely connected to reproduction.
Women have been constructed as less naturally sexual than men, which is often characterised by an absence of desire.
And indeed, researchers have documented either the complete absence of expressed desire or of a whispered expression of desire.
Among young women, where talk of desire does emerge, it is often related to male needs, bodies and desires.
And there are few spaces where women can discuss their sexual desire without being some threat,
without being some threat of danger that is held over them.
Over the last decade, researchers have begun to document changes in women's sexual desire over the life span and have
identified accounts of sexual desire that challenge dominant discourses of women's sexuality.
An online blogs and forums are thought to be places where women can develop vocabularies of sexual
desire with reduced shame around sex and build communities to share experiences and information.
And here's a photo from the project with portraits of women before, during and after having an orgasm.
And the project seeks to challenge stigma around women's sexuality, in part by acknowledging the fact that just like men,
women masturbate, and in recognising this, it seeks to normalise female pleasure.
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.
And there's a noticeable gap with men reporting experiencing orgasm during sexual activity much more frequently than women.
There's a host of research that shows this.
The latest research was just published this past January in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour.
Looking at a sample of over 50,000 adults in the US.
The survey found that heterosexual men were the most likely to report that they
usually always experience an orgasm when sexually intimate and 95% reported that.
Then next it was gay. Men are 89% bisexual men at 88%, followed by lesbians, lesbian women at 86%.
And then you see a real dip with bisexual women reporting only achieving orgasm 66% of the time.
And then at the very bottom are heterosexual women at 65%.
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.
The sheer amount of articles and magazines that are dedicated to helping women achieve the elusive female orgasm
suggest that people believe that the female orgasm is far more challenging to achieve and attain than the male orgasm.
But when you ask women about orgasms, they often report its importance in relation to men and giving male partners pleasure and orgasm,
possibly at the expense of their own pleasure and the orgasm.
And it's often idealised as romantic, sexual highpoint and symbol of femininity.
Therefore, the absence of orgasm has been identified as troubling for women,
now negatively affecting a woman's self-image and her emotional and relational well-being, as well as her sexual experiences and enjoyment.
And in the end, women can come to internalise this and believe the inability to orgasm is something that's wrong with them.
So we're talking about the taboos and stigma that surrounds menstruation, menopause and female sexuality.
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.
But now I want to move to discussing how it came about during the VQ.
Ject and the VQ project very much sits within the current political climate and the current moment of a resurgent popular feminism.
And I've been talking about the still present pervasive menstruation taboos we have here in Britain,
but there's also a growing movement led by young women and teens,
a movement that is bringing awareness to period poverty and to the call to end the tampon
tax and the need for sanitary products that are both safe and environmentally friendly.
At the forefront of the this movement is the bloody good period project, their images up there in the corner and there's many,
many other related campaigns like the homeless period and we don't bleed blue and it's becoming more and more
popular to the point that even the Girl Guides have introduced a period poverty badge that you can get.
So in relation to menopause, we have there's a movement called the Menopause Cafe,
which organises cafes across the country where women can come and talk about their experiences of menopause and share information.
But in comparison to the action that we're seeing around periods, this is there's the campaigning around menopause is relatively small.
And then we can see political action around women's sexuality.
It has a history from the seventies and there's this great book that pass around by Lynne Carmela called Vibrator Nation.
And the feminist sex shop originates in the States.
And you still have there's at least 20 in the States and maybe at least ten that I can think of in Canada.
And these are spaces that they don't just sell sex toys.
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.
And up here, here's a pick from Shush. Shush is the only female owned bricks and mortar sex shop in the UK.
It's. And it's the longest running one and I'll talk more about shush in a moment.
Also here in the picture is the Women's March with a sea of pussy pink pussy hats.
And this, of course,
was a direct rallying call around Trump's statement that he could grab women by their genitals without their consent and without consequence.
And this is all within the context of the present MeToo movement.
And those researchers who work in the area of pleasure argue that what's been missing in
these conversations that fortunately we're finally having about sex and about consent.
But what's missing from these conversations is the role of female sexual agency and of centring female pleasure,
and what that would mean for creating a culture with more egalitarian, mutually respectful and safer sexual relationships.
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.
And now we've got this new venture where we're trying to be very public facing and and do this impact project.
So we've got a logo made up. So the VQ vaginal intelligence, right?
We've got peach. That's a peach, not a nectarine.
So the goal of the VQ is to create these sex positive feminist intersectional spaces, a pop up shop, as it were.
And we invite female led social enterprises related to all things women's health, sex and pleasure to the space.
And we got funding from Steam to do this about £5,000 to start with and steam with especially with the element of innovation,
what we're hoping for in the future, as is to look at innovations within the industry around sanitary products,
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.
Let's see. So we the first one we've run one pop up so far this past March.
And we invited chefs. They came. They were our headliners.
That's Rachel here from Shush with her little vagina vulva that she used to demonstrate.
She had a very popular booth. This is Gemma, who helped out.
Here's Chely Wright here. This is Ruby from Ruka period pants.
So she started have you ever heard of period that's their maid thinks is the American
brand and Ruby started up and they've just come off the manufacturing lines.
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.
And then so those are there. And then these came from precious stars.
These are reusable pads. And this is the little thing that you wash them in, so I'll pass that around too.
So that's Bryony Farmer.
She's on YouTube and creates these fantastic YouTube videos around menstruation and menstrual health, especially for young women.
I show them to my daughter. It's been immensely helpful. Her, I forgot her name.
She came last minute to represent Umbrella Sexual Health Network, which is the biggest sexual health clinic in Birmingham and in the West Midlands.
And this is Linda Bailey, the police sergeant that does work around menopause.
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.
So you could actually talk to the people and actually see the products and just have these really great engaging conversations.
And then we had a workshop in the evening also there was Kay Winwood, an artist because of Steam.
You have, what is it? Science, technology, engineering, arts.
And so Kate K was our arts and she came and she does art projects around female pleasure.
So she was there doing these very interesting moulds and there was our little sign we took
over a shop in a place called the Great Western Arcade that had a lot of foot traffic.
And the university, of course, they want to save money. They want to do it on campus.
And we're like, No, this is an impact project. We need to go out into the public.
So those were all the great we had like an amazing group of people.
We had at least 200 women through the door on the day, men and women.
Men wouldn't usually come in on their own, a little bit too shy to do that.
On the day there was a real diversity of women of was really representative of Birmingham and ages.
There was a woman in her eighties that came in because she had heard us on the radio and she was suffering from incontinence.
And so Ruby actually sent her some free walker period pants.
And now they're going to start exploring. Can we use can we come up with other products and other uses for these?
And Linda and Ruby are continuing to talk to find out if a period pants are something that could be used for for incontinence.
So all that kind of synergy that's happening was was really amazing.
Let's see. So we've got lots of positive feedback.
We've got a Facebook page and like the things that we really like to hear where it was fun.
We were trying to not make this overly serious, but it was that you learn something and that you were made to feel comfortable,
that it wasn't like a lot of women were just it was trying to get people through the door.
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,
they could just see it was just very non-threatening, very warm, very welcoming.
And the criticisms, of course, were we just started preaching to the choir that we're attracting women that are mostly,
by and large, already comfortable talking about this stuff. And to a degree that was true.
But luckily, being in the Great Western Arcade, lots of people just pop their head in to find out what it was,
what was going on, and we're hopefully pleasantly surprised.
And the other thing, we had tried to be intersectional and diverse from the beginning,
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.
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.
In the end, they'd gotten sick and there was nobody else that could replace them.
And then we were trying to get cis sisters to come that does stuff around endometriosis,
PCOS for the Afro-Caribbean community in Birmingham and making it come in the end.
And so what that points to is that the organisations working with more marginalised groups,
it's they don't have the resources, they don't have the people that can actually show up on the day.
So we have to think like we can find representatives to come and to help,
to help that these events be more diverse, to be more reflective of the community.
But if those organisations don't have the resources, we need to come up with some solutions for that.
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.
It was theirs. Why would you play it? Menstruation and menopause and sex all in the same place.
Why would you do that? Like that? They're just different things. Why would they do that?
And the reason we were doing that is we were trying to play sex and women's pleasure
on the spectrum of women's health and well-being to try to destigmatize it in a way.
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.
So I'll talk about the next events that we're going to do, the media coverage.
We thought we were going to get lots of coverage. We didn't. So we thought The Guardian's going to love this.
It's going to eat this up. No, no, no. So we got only really Birmingham based and it was really sensationalist.
So like one says, X marks the spot and they really just focussed on the sex element and then they threw in
these images of a sex robot and a woman in lingerie and we purposely a lot of sex shops like,
like Ann Summers. The reason the way sex shops work is 30% of your product can be sexual aids.
The rest has to be non-sexual aids so that you don't have to have a special licence
because these licences for a sex shop in adult shops are extremely expensive.
They're like five grand a year.
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.
Where we did not want to do that. So the other products that we had were around again,
menstruation and menopause and then umbrella sexual health clinic had chlamydia tests and condoms
and the last dental dams that were available in the UK that are no longer funded by the NHS.
So yeah, so we weren't really thrilled with that.
And then we only got one complaint at the university from a staff that thought the university should not be promoting female pleasure.
But luckily the V-c just laughed that one off. And we do get some trolling on Facebook and social media.
So, you know, when they're really pushing out for academics to do impact work, to be out there to engage with the public.
But you also have to think about the subject matter is and if you're if you're a
female researcher and you've dared to put even the name doctor in front of your name,
the kind of backlash that we can see on social media because of that.
So we do face some of that the next thing, so the next thing.
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.
So we're going to do a Menopause Café.
We're going to do a history of menstruation day and then also help women learn how to make reusable sanitary towels.
And I'm going to do some research with these entrepreneurs.
I can't think of a name to that brings them all together. There's a name it says Vegan Event Badge Economics.
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.
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.
And it's looking pretty good, actually.
And the next event, this is the one that I can't even advertise at the university because I did too embarrassed.
It's called Bean Flix and we're doing it.
It's a feminist porn night. So we've got an academic named Dr. Lucy Neville.
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.
We've got Mistress Tatiana, a dominatrix and academic.
She's going to come and talk to us. Gillian Leno does stuff around disabilities and sexuality.
She's going to come and Kaiser Rose does stuff around black queer identities.
She's going to come as well. And then after those talks, we're going to actually run a whole bunch of feminist porn.
And I've had to do this at my university. It's been it's been very interesting.
So actually, yeah, I'm kind of I'm looking forward to not doing too much of it.
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.
So that's it. That's it for me as I look.