A mess of menopause, dating and the isms of the medical world with Mona Eltahawy

00:00:01: I weigh a hundred and fifty five.

00:00:02: I can lift two hundred and ten.

00:00:04: So I'm I'm strong, right?

00:00:06: So what I and this had nothing to do with Trump and now he's in office and I'm like, you know what?

00:00:12: When fascism flexes its muscles, it's time for feminism to become dangerous.

00:00:18: So this is what I'm becoming in the apocalypse.

00:00:20: I am becoming increasingly dangerous.

00:00:22: Dangerous.

00:00:22: Dangerous.

00:00:22: Dangerous.

00:00:24: What the what the what the actual.

00:00:37: Hello everyone, I am Tiffany Kaguremugo, Miss Pretty if you're sliding into the DMs, and welcome to What?

00:00:44: Is This Hot Mess?

00:00:47: a podcast that chills with fire feminists from across the globe to have conversations about the fact that the world is hot trash right now.

00:00:56: We chat about how this kind of feels like the end times, but these feminists show us how they are helping keep the garbage at bay.

00:01:04: by telling the world to pick up its fascism off the floor, put away its hate, violence, and general nonsense, basically to clean up its act.

00:01:14: In this episode, we have Mona, author of the books The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, Headscarfs and Hymens, Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, and also contributed to The Arab is Queer.

00:01:29: She is a freelance journalist and social commentator and has written for publications worldwide.

00:01:35: This is a global operation, folks, on Egypt and the Islamic world, on topics including women's rights, patriarchy, and Muslim political and social affairs.

00:01:46: Better yet, she strikes fear in the hearts of men and you gotta love a girl who does that and tries to make the world a more colorful and sexually liberated place.

00:01:55: This is a person after my own heart, right?

00:01:57: Like, same WhatsApp group here.

00:01:59: She also has a dope newsletter called The Feminist Giant and a brand new book called Bloody Hell, which is all about menopause.

00:02:08: Go and find out because we need to be knowing about the menopause.

00:02:11: In this episode, we chat about what the deal is with non-monogamy.

00:02:15: dating as a feminist and of course navigating menopause.

00:02:23: Round here we love a good feminist origin story or a villain origin story if you're one of those anti-feminists.

00:02:31: How it all began, you know, like also I'm just nosy so I just like to know how people got to where they are because you know feminism can pop up in the most random places like folks can find it anywhere in the boardroom in the bedroom or randomly scrolling online.

00:02:49: I personally found feminists because I had a crush on somebody and I was trying to look less problematic.

00:02:55: Also, the fact that I had to constantly get my younger guy cousin stuff and cater to him just didn't make sense to me.

00:03:04: The math was not mathic.

00:03:05: So for me, my feminist origin story was mainly about bile and spite and also trying to slide into the DMs.

00:03:14: In the case of Mona, Mona found it in the hallowed halls.

00:03:18: of higher education.

00:03:23: So I was a feminist before I knew the word feminist and so I was born in Egypt.

00:03:30: My family moved to the UK when I was seven and then we moved to Saudi Arabia when I was fifteen.

00:03:36: and that move from the UK to Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system.

00:03:41: and that's really when my feminist awareness began to bubble up.

00:03:46: but I didn't have the word.

00:03:48: And so from fifteen to nineteen, there was something going on in me that needed that word for the revolution that is feminism.

00:03:56: And I found it of all places on the bookshelves of the university I was attending in Saudi Arabia in a city called Jeddah.

00:04:05: And there's no women's and gender studies program back then.

00:04:09: Anyway, this is, you know, this is back in nineteen eighty six.

00:04:12: So back then, and I'm sure still to this day, or perhaps it's changed, I don't know.

00:04:17: There were no women's and gender studies programs.

00:04:20: And so to find a bookshelf at the university library full of feminist journals was an act of sedition.

00:04:28: So there must have been some kind of like rebellious librarian or professor.

00:04:33: who put these journals up there because nineteen-year-old Mona would go and pick them up and they terrified me because they promised to pull the thread.

00:04:45: that would just undo everything.

00:04:47: and you always know when you need something when you're on the precipice of terror when you're terrified.

00:04:53: and I would pick up these journals and I would read them.

00:04:55: and they were feminists from across the world not just white women.

00:04:59: feminists from across the world.

00:05:01: and I'm reading them and I'm like and I put them away, and I put them back, and I'd run away, and I'd come back the next day.

00:05:07: And that's where I...

00:05:08: Like contraband?

00:05:10: Exactly.

00:05:11: That's where the word was for the feeling that this shit has to change.

00:05:16: This is all wrong, and that's where feminism came.

00:05:24: No matter how long we walk the road and how we got there, our feminism isn't always bright.

00:05:29: It isn't always shiny, and it definitely is not always on point.

00:05:34: Sometimes we get it wrong.

00:05:35: Sometimes we are way, way, way off base.

00:05:38: And sometimes we just kind of just need to grow a bit, you know, just kind of settle into it.

00:05:43: I have fucked around and found out on my feminist journey enough times.

00:05:47: Like, I have had enough people be like, no girl.

00:05:50: That's not how we're doing this.

00:05:52: One example that I remember is when I did this online campaign with my platform, Hala Africa, and it was a consent to sexy campaign.

00:06:01: And I had some really wise and kind people call me out on Twitter.

00:06:05: I know Twitter, somebody kindly calling you out on Twitter is like a wild thing.

00:06:10: That consent cannot be seen as sexy.

00:06:12: Like you cannot think about consent as something that can take an off day, that can have like a goblin day, that can only be part-time hot.

00:06:20: It is constant, it is mandatory, and it is just, it just is, right?

00:06:26: It just is.

00:06:26: There's like no kind of gray area.

00:06:29: So the feminist journey is one that is not a sprint.

00:06:33: It is a marathon.

00:06:35: It is about constant growth.

00:06:36: It is about trying to figure it out and it will not always be perfect.

00:06:41: But the problem is sometimes as feminists, we don't give ourselves and others the grace.

00:06:46: We are always coming and being like, bring your best self.

00:06:50: Bring your best self or else somebody will come for you sideways, right?

00:06:54: So hence the segment, hence the segment, because you know this is the first episode, so we gotta introduce things.

00:07:00: This segment is all about that moment where you're messed up.

00:07:04: The moment where you went, oops, my bad.

00:07:07: So for Mona, that moment was thinking through a person's ability and the right to choose whether you wear a headscarf or not.

00:07:18: So a long time ago, I used to wear a headscarf.

00:07:22: You know, like I said, I'm of Muslim descent and I wore a headscarf from the age of sixteen to twenty-five.

00:07:28: And after I took my headscarf off, it took me a really long time to fight to take my headscarf off because very soon after I began to wear it, I realized it wasn't for me.

00:07:37: But family pressure and societal pressure made it very difficult for me to take it off.

00:07:41: So when I took it off, I always had within my depth, a very, very bad experience wearing the headscarf.

00:07:50: And so I projected that on to generally.

00:07:55: Headscarves and wearing them have always been associated for me with a very negative experience.

00:08:01: And so it took me a while to realize even though my mother wears a headscarf, my sister wears a headscarf, my sister-in-law wears a headscarf, and they all seem happy and perfectly fine with it.

00:08:12: But it took me a really long time to separate my negative experience wearing it from every other woman who wears it and her experience.

00:08:20: So because of how difficult it was for me, That was probably an ups moment for my feminism in that I needed to separate my negative experience and not project it onto everybody else.

00:08:33: And I spent way too many years arguing about the headscarf and I could have expanded that energy into something else.

00:08:39: I know I now no longer, I haven't for years argued about headscarves, which I still believe.

00:08:45: should not be worn by anyone because I reject the idea of modesty.

00:08:49: Now, there are many women, including my sister, for example, who will tell you she doesn't wear a headscarf because of modesty.

00:08:55: She wears it because she wants to signal to the world that she is a Muslim.

00:08:58: So it's different than when I was wearing it.

00:09:02: So I no longer argue about headscarves and I have learned to separate my negative experience with the hijab from other women's not always negative experience.

00:09:14: That's behind me now and I'm glad it is.

00:09:18: That's growth right there.

00:09:19: Learning to be able to pivot from having staunch beliefs about something to be able to accept that others are gonna have a different take.

00:09:27: And you know

00:09:28: what else is growing and changing?

00:09:30: Your body.

00:09:31: Especially when it hits menopause.

00:09:33: I know, I know.

00:09:33: That was a smooth transition to the next topic, but that's where we're at.

00:09:38: That's how we're gonna do it.

00:09:39: We're gonna be messy here on this podcast.

00:09:41: So now where we're sliding into is menopause.

00:09:45: And we all know about the change.

00:09:47: The time when the older women and anyone who is still formally walking the path of those assigned female at birth experience a tectonic shift.

00:09:57: I remember when it happened with women in my family and it was all hot flashes and handkerchiefs and monumental flights with my mother like those fights.

00:10:08: they were next level and you know what officially I'm going on record saying I'm sorry mom like that was my bad and that was poor behavior on my part.

00:10:18: One minute your period is ruining your favorite pants and the next you're going through the most wild and weird switch-ups and even your gynae is like the hell if I know what's going on which is terribly, terribly

00:10:32: unhelpful.

00:10:33: And this tracks because we live in a world where the Barbie movie came out before real blood was used to test menstrual products.

00:10:40: The first study to test the absorbency of period products Using Blood was published in August, twenty twenty three.

00:10:49: I'm sorry, what?

00:10:50: Twenty twenty three.

00:10:51: I'm going to say that one more time.

00:10:52: August, twenty twenty three.

00:10:55: Again, after the Barbie movie came out.

00:10:58: And we know a lot about erectile dysfunction.

00:11:01: Bear with me because I'm about to go full corporate nerd and quote a World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute report, which says that gender inequality and sexism are at the core of the women's health gap.

00:11:13: When coupled with racism, classism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, or other forms of oppression, the gap grows even wider.

00:11:25: Previous studies showed that funding for companies focusing on erectile dysfunction was six times higher than that for endometriosis.

00:11:33: One point two four billion for erectile dysfunction and only forty four million for endometriosis.

00:11:40: As a species, we are clearly obsessed with making things harder.

00:11:44: In twenty fifteen, there were five times more studies on erectile dysfunction than premenstrual syndrome.

00:11:52: I'm not even going to begin to break down the wild numbers of people who feel pain during a caesarean and how this is only now.

00:12:01: Now, in this, the year of our internet twenty twenty five, being investigated.

00:12:07: Despite this having been the most widely done surgery on earth, right?

00:12:12: It all boils down to the fact that some people's pain is being ignored.

00:12:17: The medical health gap is out of control.

00:12:20: Frankly, I am personally still reeling from the fact that women's body parts and some of the best ones are named after men.

00:12:27: For example, the G spot being named after Ernest Granfenberg or that Kegels are named after Arnold Kegel.

00:12:35: Right?

00:12:36: Like Arnold Kiegel.

00:12:38: Fight the patriarchy.

00:12:39: So what we need to do now, right?

00:12:41: Is fight the patriarchy by finding your G-spot and doing your Kiegel's.

00:12:45: Make them strong, y'all.

00:12:47: Make them strong so we can fight the patriarchy.

00:12:50: It's like the perfect

00:12:52: storm of

00:12:54: patriarchal fuckery because it's got to do with sexism, it's got to do with ageism, it's got to do with biological determinism and it's got to do ultimately with that medical industrial complex and basically the way that cisgender men have had their tentacles on it.

00:13:13: It's because we're socialized, you know, everywhere, across the world, across time, into the belief that assist gender.

00:13:20: woman's primary role in life is to reproduce.

00:13:24: And once she reaches that stage where she can no longer reproduce, she is of no longer of use.

00:13:30: to patriarchy.

00:13:31: so she's to be discarded and forgotten.

00:13:33: and you know go away somewhere where we can't see you and just go out to pasture and just fade away.

00:13:38: you know and so and that that that was the burden that was always flung at us and so very very little research goes into it because you know Who is the doctor that is in charge of down there?

00:13:51: You know, it's your obstetrics gynecologist, right?

00:13:54: And they, I think they're given something like two hours of training in their entire medical training that focuses on menopause because their main role is to make sure that down there works.

00:14:05: So you can pop up a baby, pop out a baby, you know, that's it.

00:14:09: And outside of that, they don't know what to do with you.

00:14:12: And then menopause.

00:14:13: brings in so many different aspects of your biology, because it affects your brain, it affects your heart, it affects your bones, it affects your muscles, it affects your reproductive organs, yes, but it affects the whole system of your body, and that would require so many specialties in medicine to come together, and it doesn't exist in that way, you know?

00:14:32: So we're funneled to our OBGYN, who doesn't know what to do with us.

00:14:37: And so, thankfully, what is helping now is that GeneXus, that's my generation.

00:14:42: we're much more vocal about menopause now and we now have like my.

00:14:46: my OBGYN is a Gen X woman and she herself is is going through menopause and so she understands because she's had to research for herself and is now able to help.

00:14:58: her patients.

00:15:00: So I think that's what it is.

00:15:01: It's sexism, ageism, and biological determinism.

00:15:04: And I'm hoping that with the greater, how vocal Gen X is being about menopause, that generations to come will be able to have access to all the information that we had to dig for.

00:15:17: Now, my mother and the generations before her, they would probably, they would talk to their friends about what was going on, but they didn't really have this availability that we now have.

00:15:27: And I'm grateful for my friend who wrote that book I mentioned earlier.

00:15:32: What fresh hell is this?

00:15:33: And my anthology is called Bloody Hell, Adventures in Menopause from around the world.

00:15:38: And the opening essay is by a Kenyan feminist.

00:15:42: And it's such a fabulous essay, a feminist essay on menopause because she, so the opening essay is by a cis gender woman from Kenya.

00:15:52: And the closing essay is by a trans mask.

00:15:56: non-binary person from the US of Asian origins.

00:16:01: And the reason that I bookend the book like that is that both essays ask us to consider menopause through the prism of freedom.

00:16:11: What will you do with the freedom that menopause brings you?

00:16:14: We rarely talk about menopause as liberation.

00:16:17: We always talk about it as being this miserable thing because of the ways we're socialized.

00:16:22: But here are two people who have gone through menopause, who present us the gift of liberation that menopause is.

00:16:30: And what Marilyn, the Kenyan feminist says in her essay that begins the book, is that one of her aunts is an example of so many women on the continent who reach a certain age and then like her aunt just suddenly say, I'm going to go and visit my grandchildren in the US and never come back.

00:16:51: And it's these women at a certain stage and they're like, you know what, fuck this shit.

00:16:56: This stage of my life is mine.

00:16:58: And she talks about this trail of African aunties who were just leaving in their menopause because they're done.

00:17:06: Done!

00:17:06: And I love that!

00:17:11: On my journey into the menopausal mysteries of life, I learned a bunch about how part of the reason menopause happens is to preserve the knowledge of the species.

00:17:22: Is this an official theory?

00:17:24: It's being bandied around out there, right?

00:17:27: And frankly, I'm ready to jump on.

00:17:29: So the idea is that we can't be having the holder of our knowledge, right?

00:17:34: Those who menstruate.

00:17:36: using all their energy to reproduce for their whole lives.

00:17:39: At some point, these folks have to stop, take a moment and pass on the knowledge.

00:17:44: So what they need to not be doing is messing up their favorite underwear and losing teeth to pregnancy.

00:17:50: Another thing we don't talk enough about.

00:17:53: Apparently we're not the only mammals who go through menopause.

00:17:56: Female orcas do as well and we know that they are some of the baddest bitches out there.

00:18:02: All you need to do is google orcas and how they manage the pack and how they harass boats.

00:18:08: They're known right now for harassing boats and we care for it and we're here for it.

00:18:13: There's also other types of whales who go through it, the belugas, the marwholes and the short finned pilot whales.

00:18:20: Probably not top of everyone's list of general whales, but they're out here.

00:18:24: They're doing it.

00:18:25: And according to a recent study, there's also the Chippanzis in a very specific part of western Uganda.

00:18:32: Just one species though.

00:18:33: Scientists have tried to figure out why menopause happens because God forbid a woman stop dropping offspring and get some time to herself.

00:18:40: Like am I right?

00:18:42: My personal theory is that it's just not sustainable.

00:18:46: Like the price of sanitary products alone makes this journey an odyssey.

00:18:51: and how many folks go through it during their period?

00:18:56: Like physically go through it.

00:18:59: I had one friend who had to legit take a week off work to go multiple rounds with her reproductive system in peace, away from the capitalist grind.

00:19:10: And this happened every month.

00:19:12: She was just in so much pain.

00:19:16: And it feels like at this moment in time, there should be a simpler way to shout, not pregnant, to the world outside of like messing up your favorite underwear.

00:19:28: I watched a reel about how we evolved to have our period on purpose as a species.

00:19:33: but look

00:19:34: the jury is still out there for me like the jury is still out as to whether this is the most effective way but I didn't create humanity.

00:19:44: so like who am I to give feedback?

00:19:47: but anyway menopause happens and it would seem that the conversation is growing and becoming less and less sidelined and less and less silenced, which is amazing.

00:19:58: Also, perimenopause, right?

00:20:00: Another phrase that I recently learned.

00:20:03: Go and research all about that.

00:20:04: This is not a health podcast, but it just know it's out there.

00:20:08: Perimenopause.

00:20:09: Google it.

00:20:10: Ask your local Guiney.

00:20:12: Get that ball rolling.

00:20:14: It doesn't matter what age you are.

00:20:16: You do not want this sneaking up on you the way it seems to have snuck up on women for time immemorial because no one is talking about it.

00:20:37: Thank you all for being vocal because I'm not even sure.

00:20:41: The rest of us like we're gonna live forever.

00:20:43: It'll be fine.

00:20:45: It'll be fine.

00:20:47: Oh gosh, and is it treating you well these days?

00:20:50: So it is narrow because I've spent so much time, you know, delving into it and like really, really going inwards to figure out what I want from this stage of my life and what I don't want because it is a great liberator.

00:21:04: And to unbecome, I really think of it as a process of unbecoming in order to become who Mona will be in future.

00:21:14: stages like the poet June Jordan in her poem to South African women that she wrote in nineteen eighty one ends the the poem with.

00:21:22: we are the ones we have been waiting for and I have that line that verse tattooed on my arm next to the ancient Egyptian goddess Ahmed who is the goddess of retribution and sex.

00:21:34: so we are the ones we have been waiting for and so I think of menopause now as this process this transition of leaving the old Mona plural behind in order to walk towards the Mona plural that I am becoming, you know.

00:21:53: And in addition to all that I told you earlier about sex and sexuality and all the kind of like the ways that I have explored my own sexuality, one of the things that became increasingly apparent to me as I got older was that I'm non-monogamous as well as queer, you know, mostly bisexual.

00:22:12: and I'm like fully open about my non monogamy now because and it's it's it's one of the again it's one of the important things for me as I'm going through menopause because I know for a lot of my married cishet women they reach menopause.

00:22:28: and did you know that divorce among midlife couples is often initiated by the woman?

00:22:35: this is in heterosexual partnerships and it's because it's menopause they reach the stage of life where again like the African aunties in in Marilyn's essay you know for those who are in in cis-het relationships in heterosexual relationships they look So their children, if they've had them, have grown and have left the house, gone to uni or whatever.

00:22:57: And these women and the men that they were partnered with have so changed from who they used to be.

00:23:03: And this emptiness, you know, we often talk about emptiness.

00:23:05: I think it's less the sadness at seeing the kids go and more kind of like looking at the partner and going, I don't even fucking recognize this man I'm with anymore.

00:23:16: And the women initially exist.

00:23:18: And the women are just done, and they just go.

00:23:21: And my solution to all of this, I'm not in a heterosexual marriage.

00:23:24: I have a non-monogamous partnership.

00:23:27: I have a primary partner, but I have other partners.

00:23:30: My solution to this was non monogamy because I could never be with this one person who then after twenty five years I would go.

00:23:37: oh my god I need to go out there and just live the rest of my life the way I want you know.

00:23:42: So menopause becomes a stage in life now where you finally give yourself permission to be all the people that you want to be.

00:23:49: So like I said it's unbecoming in order to become you unlearn in order to continue learning.

00:23:55: It's such and when we stop reading the shit that is out there through so-called women's magazines and popular culture about being a cishet woman, specifically focusing now on cishet women, it leaves a space in your mind for all of this other stuff to come in.

00:24:14: So, you know, I haven't touched one of those stupid magazines in decades, you know, and that has created, like I said, a space in me, because what am I going to do with a magazine that has a twenty-five year old on the cover?

00:24:26: How is this going to help my life at all, you know?

00:24:30: And this is a magazine.

00:24:30: I'm thinking of something like Vogue.

00:24:32: Of course, I appreciate fashion.

00:24:34: But Vogue is a magazine that was like an empire run by a woman in her seventies now, Anna Wintour, that constantly fed us this ageist fuckery.

00:24:44: of having a constant stream of mostly young white women on the cover presenting to us how we should be.

00:24:51: fuck that shit and then it ended up you know creating all of these monsters like it.

00:24:57: that that locked us into an idea of what it is to be a woman you know.

00:25:02: smash your idols and create your own ideals of what it is that you want to be.

00:25:07: you know become the person you've waited to become.

00:25:09: i think this is the biggest lesson of menopause free yourself you know

00:25:14: And this is exactly what Mona did.

00:25:17: Anyone who knows of her work knows that she is a big advocate for the sexual revolution and all about freeing our minds and our bodies from the tyranny of the patriarchy and its friends, misogyny and messed up traditions.

00:25:32: As she said, even in menopause, freeing herself emotionally, intimately and sexually is a big part of her vibe.

00:25:40: Getting to this point was a sprint, not a marathon.

00:25:44: and took time, work, and a lover or three.

00:25:47: To find the right meal, one must sometimes sample the entire buffet.

00:25:53: Well, that's also how I began to follow Holla, right?

00:25:56: I mean, that is, do you pronounce it Holla?

00:26:00: Holla Africa, to be precise, where Tiff goes to play.

00:26:03: This is my online platform that I started years and years ago with my partner and our friend.

00:26:10: which started as a blog and is now what we like to term a passion project gone wild.

00:26:16: It is a sex positive platform that looks at all things sex and sexuality and loves to look at how Africans are living and loving.

00:26:25: It is a sexy and funky and fun space and just wants everyone to be having the sex that they deserve.

00:26:32: So Mona met us on Twitter back when it was called that.

00:26:36: I don't care for this ex thing, but those are my own personal things.

00:26:40: But

00:26:40: that's where Mona met us on Twitter back in the day.

00:26:43: And we used to tweet stuff like, here are thirteen examples of orgasms you didn't know about.

00:26:49: And what lube should you be using with your sex toy?

00:26:52: It was a good time.

00:26:53: It was a simpler time.

00:26:55: Back when we were young and free online, back before Instagram had kicked us off the platform more than once.

00:27:02: We have been banned from Instagram.

00:27:04: And we just keep coming back.

00:27:07: We just keep coming back.

00:27:10: Yes, friendship things.

00:27:11: I love this for us, digital friendship.

00:27:14: I mean, I began following you all on Twitter, you know, years ago, because it was such a thrill to encounter fellow African feminists who were focusing on sex.

00:27:26: Because so much of the feminism back in the day, I mean, perhaps not so much now, I'm fifty seven.

00:27:32: So when I say back in the day, I'm talking about second wave feminism, you know, a lot of second wave feminists if you know you even want to call them that but feminists were like seventies and eighties in the nineteen seventies in the nineteen eighties we're focusing and understandably on things like especially in the so-called west you know on things like um to partner violence building shelters fighting to get rape on you know on the law books and and things like that.

00:28:00: and many of them didn't focus on sex and you would hear a lot of sex activists and sex positive feminists complain that they were always told, look, we've got all these really important things, important things to do, you know, as if our sexuality and our sexual expression is not important, you know, but that just speaks

00:28:21: for itself.

00:28:23: Yes, I mean like if they were they were just something that you just took care of by yourself because we have big things to take care of and I really resent this big thing label because you know we are thinking people we are feeling people we are fucking people.

00:28:36: we can do all three at once.

00:28:38: you know we don't have to compartmentalize and and that's that's why sex for me became more and more important because I believe that it's it's one of the big things but personally for me especially.

00:28:53: so I was born into a Muslim family.

00:28:55: I was born in Egypt and like I said we moved to Saudi Arabia when I was fifteen and everything I was taught was sex comes when you get married.

00:29:03: sex comes when you get married to a man.

00:29:05: you are heterosexual you know.

00:29:06: back then we didn't use cisgender.

00:29:08: I was born in nineteen sixty seven you know.

00:29:10: but like you're a woman you're gonna marry a man.

00:29:12: you're not just gonna marry a man you're gonna marry an Egyptian Muslim man you know from a certain... Oh

00:29:17: specific

00:29:18: So specific and so I grew up with this.

00:29:21: you know this this this kind of thing and it just all became a black.

00:29:26: Apparently, you know bullshit, but it took me a really long time to call it a such and it actually took me a really long time to rebel against it.

00:29:35: So initially what helped me?

00:29:37: to basically wait it out was I began masturbating when I was very young and it was fucking incredible.

00:29:43: I remember my first orgasm, like deliberate orgasm when I was about eleven because in London on the sex education class they showed us this film saying children often discover their bodies and like you know explore and all of this.

00:29:56: and I was like oh let's go home and explore.

00:29:57: I explored and it was incredible.

00:30:00: So the masturbation kept me going for a really long time but And this is a massive butt.

00:30:05: I did not have sex with another person until I was twenty-nine.

00:30:09: Twenty-nine.

00:30:11: Because

00:30:11: you lost your virginity at twenty-nine?

00:30:13: Yeah, I mean, and fuck the word virginity.

00:30:15: Yeah, I had sex with... Oh, you

00:30:16: see?

00:30:17: Look at me.

00:30:17: I'm doing my own work, y'all.

00:30:20: You know, I see this, this is how deeply it is ingrained, you know.

00:30:24: So ingrained.

00:30:26: That exists for us.

00:30:27: This is why I have to use this really labor term.

00:30:30: I first had sex with another person, you know, because I was having sex by myself with myself.

00:30:37: In this moment, I show my whole ass and question Mona about losing her virginity.

00:30:42: Like I have not been running a sex positive platform for the better part of a decade.

00:30:47: But let me take a minute to redeem myself and take a moment to give a virginity PSA.

00:30:54: The idea of virginity is not a medical or physiological term, but something held dear in the cultural and religious collective minds of people.

00:31:04: There's no medical test to determine virginity, and the concept isn't even recognized in scientific or medical fields.

00:31:10: If it's all about the hymen, you can break it from riding a bike or riding a horse.

00:31:14: The idea of something you give away, like a trinket or a small token, is actually wild.

00:31:20: How exactly does someone take your virginity?

00:31:23: And what is the warranty on it?

00:31:24: It is all a scam, one that clearly lives rent-free in my mind.

00:31:31: because it took me so long to unlearn what I was taught.

00:31:35: And I say this, you know, when I began to say this in public, people will be like, oh, and then I would say to them, no, no, no, don't feel sorry for me.

00:31:43: Because since then, I began to fuck the guilt out of my system.

00:31:48: Because when you're socialized like that, there's so much guilt, right?

00:31:52: And I was like, I was on a mission.

00:31:53: I was like, I am fucking the guilt out of my system.

00:31:57: And I did.

00:31:59: Was this with different partners or with like one partner like give us the tea?

00:32:03: Yeah So it started with one partner and then it developed into many partners and I would.

00:32:08: I would you know These ridiculous black books back in the day that men would have their little black book with all the numbers of the women in it.

00:32:14: So I had my little black book and I would just put yes first the first letter of each person I slept with.

00:32:26: I always say it communication, communication, communication.

00:32:30: Okay, maybe I haven't always said it, but I grew up and learned that I cannot expect my lovers to be mind readers.

00:32:37: I had to have this hard conversation with myself, which I continuously have as a self-confessed bottom.

00:32:44: I am putting it out there.

00:32:45: I am a self-confessed bottom.

00:32:47: And it is a conversation I have to continuously have with myself that I cannot outsource my pleasure.

00:32:53: But the thing is, you can only communicate what you want once you know what you want.

00:32:58: The best way to get the sort of quotas that you want is by knowing what you want and then communicating what you want.

00:33:07: I know, revolutionary, right?

00:33:08: It's just sex positivity, one-on-one.

00:33:11: Know what you want and then ask for what you want.

00:33:14: It might be time then to get yourself a little black book, start taking some notes, start figuring out what it is you are doing.

00:33:23: You know, you've given me an idea now.

00:33:25: Maybe I should now start keeping notes because back then I was, I was just putting down the first letter of their name because I was really proud of myself.

00:33:34: And that is the best way to describe it, that I had overcome this deeply ingrained socialization of sex with your husband and you have to wait.

00:33:44: And I got fed up of waiting.

00:33:46: There was no one I wanted to marry.

00:33:47: And back then, too, And I'm hoping this continues.

00:33:51: I used to terrify men.

00:33:52: I mean, they were literally terrified of me.

00:33:55: So I was like, of course, I wasn't going to wait.

00:33:59: And I asked the person that I had sex with, I asked him out.

00:34:03: So I had planned the whole thing.

00:34:06: And we ended up dating and staying together for a couple of years afterwards.

00:34:10: But since him, so my first sexual partner was a cisgender heterosexual man.

00:34:16: But since then, I have slept with a variety of people.

00:34:18: of various genders and various orientations.

00:34:22: So it's all over the sexual map now.

00:34:26: Any good feminist with the assault knows that dating is going to be a roller coaster.

00:34:33: The streets are wild and dating can be really treacherous when you are trying to balance smashing the patriarchy with getting a little something sweet on a Saturday night.

00:34:44: Because people are doing the Lord, L-O-R-D-E's work, There are studies on the orgasm statistics of various genders and sexualities and sexual orientations.

00:34:56: And I never fail to trot out this particular body of work.

00:35:00: I'm talking, I trot it out all the time.

00:35:03: Barbecues, gatherings, panels, like, it is like my go-to research.

00:35:09: But let me tell you, buckle in, and if you're pressed about the results, fight yourself in the comments.

00:35:15: Fight yourself on the internet, or just get better at sex.

00:35:18: if you are personally pressed.

00:35:20: So

00:35:21: the orgasm gap.

00:35:23: Let's start there.

00:35:23: It is real and has been documented for ages.

00:35:28: In one study of more than fifty thousand people, ninety-five percent of heterosexual men said they usually are always orgasm when sexually intimate, while only sixty-five percent of heterosexual women said the same.

00:35:43: This study then goes on to say that heterosexual men were most likely to say they usually or always orgasmed when sexually intimate at ninety-five percent, followed by gay men at eighty-nine percent, bisexual men at eighty-eight percent, lesbian women at eighty-six, bisexual women at sixty-six, and then coming in lasts, unfortunately, heterosexual women at sixty-five.

00:36:11: Please note, these are very biological terms, so please forgive the study and myself for that.

00:36:16: But I'm also saying, right, that there is a pattern here.

00:36:21: There's a pattern here, and I would be reckless to not point it out.

00:36:26: But the numbers seem to drop for women when the fellas are involved.

00:36:30: It's not me.

00:36:31: It's not me saying this fellas, it's science.

00:36:34: Okay, it's science.

00:36:36: So I asked Mona what the streets were looking like dating different genders, especially after menopause.

00:36:43: Yeah, it's a challenge.

00:36:46: It definitely is.

00:36:47: I mean, like, so I have been out as queer for a while now.

00:36:52: So I'm specifically bisexual.

00:36:55: And when I do have sex with cis men, I'm reminded of the challenge because it's a constant kind of like staying awake, woke staying awake to the things that they say and making sure that they know when they are with me that they are with a feminist and it's not like.

00:37:16: I mean I don't want to be you know at work on the job full-time but they have to know that whatever happens out there, whatever they think they can say and do with other people is not done with me.

00:37:30: And that is like a small, tiny hope because it's a constant struggle that they will take that away when they're not with me, you know, that they will know that there is a woman that I encountered, whether it was for casual sex or a more regular kind of relationship.

00:37:48: who took me to task for saying something that was misogynist, for behaving in a way that wasn't feminist, you know?

00:37:56: And, you know, it was Audrey Lord who said, straight people always expect queer people to educate them, white people always expect black and people of color to educate them, men always expect women to educate them.

00:38:09: So the onus is always on us and it's fucking exhausting.

00:38:13: but it's right but it's also an opportunity to just kind of disrupt their programming.

00:38:19: you know and you know I. you know what helps me as well and I really I hear this from other women.

00:38:25: for other feminists like women friends who also have sex with cis men it sometimes not always helps because I have a thing for younger people generally and many of my sexual partners are younger than me.

00:38:38: And so I find with the sishap men that I have sex with who are younger than me, especially much younger than me, it is a much easier landscape as the best way to describe it.

00:38:51: I find that much younger sishap men care much more about a woman's, their female partner's pleasure.

00:39:01: They care much more about, or they're not interested in like constantly, did you come, did you come, you know, that kind of ridiculousness.

00:39:10: And, you know, they are open to a whole array of kind of the sexual buffet, as you were saying, because I know from my contemporaries, you know, female friends in their fifties, that sometimes they encounter cis men in their fifties and up.

00:39:26: who will not perform oral sex.

00:39:29: And I'm like, what the actual fuck?

00:39:31: What?

00:39:32: How is this still

00:39:33: happening?

00:39:34: In this economy, in this economy,

00:39:39: how have they not gone extinct?

00:39:41: Somehow.

00:39:41: Right.

00:39:43: Right.

00:39:46: Now, I was going to say that I read a paper.

00:39:50: You'll be surprised how often I got away with that when I was in academia.

00:39:53: But I didn't.

00:39:54: I did not read a paper.

00:39:56: In fact, I watched a reel on Instagram of a woman reading a paper about how the rise of the red pill in some men was actually a form of self-selection for weeding out certain undesirable traits within the species, as the self-isolation meant that they weren't finding someone to mate with.

00:40:18: So the math kind of checks out.

00:40:20: You're terrible, you don't get to contribute to the collective gene pool.

00:40:24: My sizzling hot take, and I have a lot of them, is that men need to look at the ways in which the animal kingdom are courting.

00:40:31: We need more shiny pebbles, elaborate dances, and look and fly.

00:40:36: There's one type of bird that cleans the area around it just before mating, and there are men online within our species saying that they don't need to wipe their bumps because that's not what real men do.

00:40:48: All the while, these male birds are going full interior designer to find a mate.

00:40:53: Fun fact, this bird is actually called the bird of paradise, the western paratio tier.

00:41:00: Yes, I saw it on Netflix on some National Geographic things.

00:41:06: the world planet.

00:41:07: It's a really good series.

00:41:08: Go find out about your planet.

00:41:09: But anyway, I am no dating coach, but this is far more likely to get you a date than degenerating on the internet about the things that are wrong with women in society.

00:41:22: What's it?

00:41:22: How's your sex changed as you've gotten older?

00:41:24: Please give us hope that it gets better.

00:41:27: I'm giving you lots of hope.

00:41:30: It's fucking fantastic.

00:41:32: It's like the best sex of my life.

00:41:37: I mean, this will resonate with the people who are able to get pregnant and who are having sex with a partner who can help them get pregnant or who can impregnate them for lack of a better term.

00:41:50: when you are post-menopausal as I am, and pregnancy is off the table, and I'm child-free by choice.

00:41:56: Happily so.

00:41:57: I never wanted to have children.

00:41:58: I've had two abortions, and I always say that if I'd ever gotten pregnant again, I would have had another abortion.

00:42:03: Children was just something I did not want.

00:42:06: I love kids.

00:42:06: I just came home from five weeks with my sister, helping her and her husband look after their firstborn.

00:42:12: Love my nibblings.

00:42:13: I love them.

00:42:14: I'm a great aunt, but I would not have made a great mother.

00:42:17: And I think it's really important for us all to reflect on, you know, our skills and talents.

00:42:22: So when pregnancy is off the table, sex becomes, oh my God, I would say a spiritual experience and out of this world experience, an experience in which you really feel what sex is like unhindered by all of this fuckery that basically is because of the biological determinism that was forced upon us.

00:42:46: It liberates you to just lose yourself in this incredible way.

00:42:51: I try to write about it and I don't know if I can and I'm a writer, you know?

00:42:56: It's fucking incredible.

00:42:58: I have to say, though, that the transition to this incredibleness, so at the height of my perimenopause, which I didn't have the word for, because it's that stage before you flip into postmenopause, it's perimenopause.

00:43:13: I went about a year without having sex with anybody, including myself.

00:43:18: So no masturbation and no sex with anyone else.

00:43:21: And if you had ever told me that having struggled so long to rid myself of this sexual shame and to fuck the shame out of my system and to like, not make up for lost time, but to have as much sex as I wanted.

00:43:33: If you told me I would go for a year without sex in my forties, I would have killed you.

00:43:38: But it happened.

00:43:40: And it was a real.

00:43:42: It was a shock.

00:43:42: It really was.

00:43:43: And I was going around saying, oh my god, I'm broken.

00:43:46: My vagina's broken.

00:43:47: My vulva's broken.

00:43:48: And a friend of mine, a non-binary friend who wrote a book about menopause called What Fresh Hell Is This, which is a fantastic title, told me that your sex drive isn't broken.

00:44:01: Your vulva and vagina aren't broken.

00:44:03: They're just evolving into the next phase.

00:44:07: And my friend was absolutely right.

00:44:09: Because once I got over that, And I dealt with menopause in all the ways that I had to deal with it.

00:44:17: It's been fucking incredible.

00:44:23: I am a sucker for a segment.

00:44:24: And this particular one is all about saying the wild part out loud, right?

00:44:31: It's about saying the thing that will get you disinvited from a dinner party.

00:44:36: It is about where the guest feels super deeply about something.

00:44:40: And I just put it as a standalone thing because I can.

00:44:43: Because we gotta be chaotic like that.

00:44:46: Truth be told, people are going to fight you in the comments anyway, so you might as well say the quiet part out loud.

00:44:53: Say

00:44:53: the wild thing and say it with your chest.

00:44:56: So welcome to the first edition of Fight Me in the Comments.

00:45:01: In this edition of Fight Me in the Comments, Mona says the wild thing.

00:45:04: Two is cool, but three or more is definitely company.

00:45:09: And maybe more of us should be dabbling in non-monogamy.

00:45:14: Oh my goodness.

00:45:15: But like you said, I mean, I have so many of them.

00:45:17: I have so many hills.

00:45:18: I have so many mountains.

00:45:20: Many of them.

00:45:21: But you know, increasingly, I really think it's about liberating ourselves from the socialization that so many of us kind of drift into.

00:45:30: And I really think my fight me in the comments thing is monogamy.

00:45:35: I believe that we are not meant to be monogamous.

00:45:38: And I believe that I think people genuinely think that they will give it a shot and that they try their best.

00:45:48: But ultimately, I believe the majority of people, because I'm going to leave some wiggle room, I believe the majority of people, if not everybody, struggles and cannot be monogamous.

00:46:00: So I'm like, non-monogamy for everyone.

00:46:02: Fight me in the comments.

00:46:04: Fight me in the comments.

00:46:07: I love it.

00:46:10: And on the topic of commitment, I knew I could not let Mona go without at least touching on the Tread Wife conversation.

00:46:17: I've heard the joke, who can afford to be monogamous in this economy?

00:46:21: Apparently, Tread Wives.

00:46:23: But is it actually a scam?

00:46:25: Yes.

00:46:26: Yes, it is.

00:46:27: Tread Wiping is actually the revenge of the patriarchy.

00:46:31: Yeah.

00:46:31: So, like I said, so my generation was poisoned by these magazines.

00:46:36: And I said that I've stopped, you know, I've cleansed out of my life.

00:46:40: And this is revenge of the patriarchy.

00:46:42: now is through the online space because they realize that younger generations don't read, you know, hard publications in the way that, you know, us older types did.

00:46:51: And so they've met us online.

00:46:54: And so you'll see that, you know, that statistics have shown that young people, especially young girls, since twenty ten, I think it is, or twenty twelve have steadily increasing rates of depression and mental illness that are directly tied to the online space, because they're now more and more online than previous generations were.

00:47:16: And the online space now is where patriarchy really is wreaking its revenge.

00:47:21: And you see it most forcefully in the Trad Wife movement, in the traditional values, because that's what Trad Wife means, traditional wife, right?

00:47:29: And so they've seen that there were these pockets of liberation moments where we're like, you know what?

00:47:36: We recognize this bullshit for what it is and we're not accepting it anymore until they bring us these perfect quote unquote looking women.

00:47:45: You know, it's all these skinny white women.

00:47:46: That's what it is.

00:47:47: It's skinny white women.

00:47:50: Yeah.

00:47:51: Or presenting themselves as, again, you know, I said the cover of magazines used to always be skinny young white women.

00:47:57: It's now skinny young white women online presenting themselves to us as the thing we should aspire to.

00:48:04: And these are things that we should be destroying.

00:48:07: But the world is increasingly turning.

00:48:09: towards the right.

00:48:11: It's becoming increasingly fascist.

00:48:12: It's becoming increasingly right-wing.

00:48:14: The majority of the world now, according to political scientists, is living under authoritarianism.

00:48:20: I learned recently that three out of four people around the world live under tyranny of some sort.

00:48:26: Part of that, that the spine, the backbone, of fascism and authoritarianism is patriarchy because it's about control.

00:48:35: So what fascism is to control through the weapon of patriarchy, feminism is to liberation.

00:48:42: And this is why we have to use our feminism right now is even more urgent than ever.

00:48:49: because we're seeing now they are presenting to us.

00:48:51: Because, you know, we became familiar with the Andrew Tate and the manospheres and the men's rights movement.

00:48:58: We recognize all of that and incels and all of that.

00:49:02: Andrew Tate and Friends, the red pill gang, members of the manosphere who are on the internet telling lonely and vulnerable guys that the best way to exist in the world is to be an alpha male.

00:49:14: Funny enough, a theory that has been wildly debunked.

00:49:17: There is no such thing as alpha males.

00:49:19: But anyway, it's fine.

00:49:21: Base your whole identity on that.

00:49:23: Go for it, sir.

00:49:23: This is a space that is all about spreading ideas about being an alpha male and saying wild things online like, women are barely sentient creatures and must submit just general nonsense.

00:49:34: Dudes with podcasts and YouTube channels.

00:49:38: So they managed to suck in the young men.

00:49:40: right?

00:49:41: And it's increasing the young men who are voting for the right-wing parties and Trump and all of that.

00:49:46: Now they're targeting young women, specifically young white women in countries like the United States and others, because here in the

00:49:54: U.S.,

00:49:54: it's mostly white women.

00:49:57: White women in their majority have been voting for the Republicans for decades now, you know, but they want even more of them to vote.

00:50:04: And so they're targeting them with these skinny white, trad wives.

00:50:08: But somehow the trend has gone global.

00:50:11: And now we're going to see people of color, black and people of color copying the trend, because this is what ends up happening, you know, and we have to fight it tooth and

00:50:19: nail.

00:50:21: So how do how do we fight something like that?

00:50:23: Because you look at these online spaces and There's, you know, being shadow band and like holla, we've had things taken down numerous times.

00:50:32: We recently had an audio erotic anthology taken down by Apple podcast because they were like,

00:50:37: we

00:50:38: don't like your cover.

00:50:39: I was like, but we already told you it's explicit.

00:50:42: What more did you want from us?

00:50:43: So how do we fight something like this?

00:50:46: Yeah, it's really hard because all these tech pros, these are billionaires.

00:50:51: who are mostly white.

00:50:53: So it's like, it's driven by white supremacy and patriarchy.

00:50:58: And it's very, very difficult to fight, but we can fight them online and offline.

00:51:02: Like you and I having this conversation now, and you will go and talk to people about it.

00:51:07: I will go and talk to people about it.

00:51:08: And I'm hoping it's going to be watched by many people.

00:51:11: So we fight it in every space where we exist.

00:51:15: And one of the easiest ways to fight it, I believe, is to remind people that these so-called trad wives represent a very privileged, come from a very privileged background and they're selling us a lie.

00:51:27: You know, if someone is sitting there on her reel or TikTok or whatever it is that she uses and spends like all day making a cheese sandwich, right?

00:51:37: We have to unpack that and first we'll ask who the fuck has time to spend all day making cheese from scratch, making bread from scratch, and making a sandwich for her man, you know?

00:51:48: Who

00:51:49: has the money to hire all of this help to look after her?

00:51:54: What is it?

00:51:54: Ten children that she has deliberately procreated with her millionaire husband who has the privilege of being married to a millionaire?

00:52:02: who the fuck wants to be married to a millionaire?

00:52:04: anyway?

00:52:05: I don't but say you want to be married to a millionaire.

00:52:07: who has the opportunity to be married to a millionaire?

00:52:10: so these are people who come from a tiny slice of society who are presenting a fallacy and a lie to us that most people will never never attain in their lives.

00:52:21: So we have to call out the lie and say that this comes from a very privileged background, whether it's racially or materially.

00:52:28: And it's just not sustainable for most people.

00:52:30: And you're going to see, like I said, an increase, a massive increase in mental illness, in mental health struggles, because the distance between the reality and the lies that are sold to us are going to become increasingly wider.

00:52:46: And this is all, like I said, it's revenge of the patriarchy.

00:52:52: Recording and conceptualizing this podcast episode actually had me rethinking menopause.

00:52:58: It had me rethinking my engagement or lack thereof with it.

00:53:02: And also it wildly shifted my Instagram algorithm.

00:53:06: Like, the content on there had me radicalized, especially the stuff about reproductive health and the systems of medicine and science that, like, just surround all of that.

00:53:19: And it had me, like, having big thoughts and big feelings at five-thirty in the morning.

00:53:24: The ways in which the reproductive systems of those who are told, being deeply ignored is wild to me.

00:53:36: It's like pick a lane.

00:53:38: Are you gonna monitor or are you gonna ignore?

00:53:41: If you're going to be all up in my vagina, commit.

00:53:44: Know the medical background.

00:53:46: Don't invent the chainsaw to originally be used as a birthing tool and then think that you're on top of things.

00:53:52: Yeah, that's actually a real thing.

00:53:54: Look it up.

00:53:55: If you're so interested in what's happening between my thighs and beyond, get the full picture.

00:54:02: Less Women find fulfillment in motherhood and more funding of research on reproductive health and wellness.

00:54:08: Or just say the quiet part out loud and say you don't really care and it's about control.

00:54:15: Okay.

00:54:16: Okay.

00:54:16: I got a little ranty, but excuse me.

00:54:20: I'm on my period.

00:54:21: Ayo!

00:54:23: Anyway.

00:54:23: I should probably wrap this up and give, in the final moments, a huge shout out to check out Mona's newsletter, Feminist Giant, and also make sure you pick up her latest book, Bloody Hell.

00:54:38: Both are gonna be linked

00:54:39: in the bio.

00:54:42: Until the next episode, I am Tiffany Kogoremogo, saying howl at the moon, bark at strangers, eat ice cream for breakfast, do what you want, because it's all chaos anyway.

00:54:53: Because this is not the apocalypse we signed up

00:54:56: for.

00:54:58: Shout

00:54:58: out to the Global Unit for Feminism and Gender Democracy of the Heinrich Bohr Foundation that is hosting this podcast and my magical team Ray and Sheldon for that post-apocalyptic production.

00:55:11: This episode was executive produced by Yours Truly.