Author: franklin

This episode has been plagued with problems and technical glitches, but fear not, in the end we triumphed!

In this episide, the three of us talk about Emily Nagoski’s book Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life, which attempts to take a rigorous look at how libido works. (Spoiler: It’s complicated, and no, men aren’t always horny.)

Nagoski talks about “accelerators,” social and situational factors that drive us toward sexual engagement, and “brakes,” social and situational factors that hold back our libido. The book offers a quiz to help you understand how your libido works, though as we discuss in the episode, there are some problems with it (Nagoski seems to be coming from looking at libido from a narrow perspective of one-on-one monogamous encounters without factors like kink or fetishes).

Here’s the transcript:

Franklin: Hello, and welcome to Skeptical Perverts, the podcast where we look at human sexuality through an evidence-based, skeptical lens! I’m one of your hosts and part-time mad scientist, Franklin Veaux.

Joreth: Hi! I’m your co-host and Renaissance cat, Joreth! I have a background in human sexuality and relationship communication, I’m kinky, solo polyamorous, on the ace spectrum, chicana, feminist, my gender identity is “tomboy”, and my pronouns are she/her but I use masculine titles.

Eunice: And I’m Eunice, your friendly neighbourhood queer, kinky, grey-ace demisexual. I’m an East Asian cis woman, hailing from the British side of the pond, with a large pot of tea and a correspondingly sizeable dose of genteel snark. This week: libido! More specifically, spontaneous versus responsive libidos. We’ll also be talking about the excitatory and inhibitory sexual systems. A lot of what we’ll be discussing came from the book Come as You Are: the bestselling guide to the new science that will transform your sex life by Dr Emily Nagoski, specifically the revised and updated edition that came out in March 2021. 

Franklin: This book is really interesting, and I highly recommend it for a number of reasons. We took a look at it and some other sources for this episode (check out the show notes online), so let’s get started: Joreth and Eunice, you really wanted to talk about this topic, so what are spontaneous libido and responsive libido?

Joreth: Spontaneous Libido or Spontaneous Desire is what we think of as just “libido” – a person feels sexual arousal, and thinks “hey, I’m aroused, I should find something to have sex with!” This thought process is largely subconscious and nearly instantaneous, and if the person already has a regular sexual partner, then the question is answered for them without any conscious questioning of it. They feel arousal first, they go looking for their partner. 

Franklin: I like how you said “something to have sex with,” not “someone to have sex with.” 

Joreth:  That was deliberate!

Franklin:  That’s basically how I work! I’ll be walking down the street minding my own business and then Wham! Hey, I’m horny! It comes out of the blue, without necessarily being attached to any triggering sight or sound or anything. When I tried bremelanotide like we talked about in the first episode, I felt that same thing but a thousand times stronger.

Joreth: Hah, yeah, that has maybe only happened to me a handful of times in my entire life, and usually under very specific contexts, which we’ll get into later. A Responsive Libido or Responsive Desire is when the body has sexual things happening to it and then the brain goes “oh, right, we like this! OK, fire up the engines everyone, it’s time to have sex!”

Eunice: In many ways it’s hard to even really talk about this clearly — we barely have suitable words to describe the experience of responsive libidos, because we live in a world where spontaneous libidos are considered ‘the norm’ or ‘the ideal’ or even ‘what sexual desire looks like’. In that situation, how do you talk about having a responsive libido in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re saying “my unusual way of feeling sexual desire”? But having a responsive libido is not only entirely normal and usual, but Dr Nagoski suggests that everyone basically has it. It’s just that some people have the spontaneous version as well. 

Joreth: Yeah, it’s so frustrating because society 1) assumes that Spontaneous Desire is the default form of libido, making any other form of libido “deviant” automatically and then 2) assumes that Spontaneous Libido is the MALE default, which then if you follow that to its logical conclusion, means that women all have the same sex drive and that it’s deviant while all men have the same sex drive and that it’s the “normal” version.

Franklin: Assuming that spontaneous libido is ‘male’ and responsive libido is ‘female’ seems to fit what we see in a lot of romantic comedies, but I have to say I’ve known men with responsive libidos and I’ve dated women with spontaneous libidos, so calling them ‘male’ and ‘female’ libidos seems a little farfetched.

Joreth: Seems to fit romantic comedies and, like, every dudebro on the internet who swear that women don’t like sex but use it to dupe men into giving them money. And, yeah, I’ve dated quite a few men with responsive libidos. It’s convenient for them to have someone like me as a partner because they won’t get pressured by their partner into sex when they’re not feeling it or have their masculinity challenged when I’m also not feeling it. 

On the downside, though, we might both be open to sex if sexy stuff starts happening, but with neither of us starting it, I’ve been in several relationships where the sex just didn’t happen for months, even years at a time because it didn’t occur to either one of us to start it spontaneously.

Eunice: Oh goodness, yes that sounds familiar, have you been making notes on my relationships?? Before we go any further, one of the things I want to note here is that a lot of the research was done by researchers with assumptions about binary gender, so when we’re referring to studies we have to use the language they used in their write ups. It’s not that we, or Dr Nagoski, think that there are only cis females and cis males, it’s that the scientists who did the research started from that assumption, and often only studied cis people, so we’re having to discuss these studies in that light. And that is something we need to remember throughout. Scientists are also people, who are impacted by the media around them, and their societal conditioning. Which might also explain why it was so much easier to find studies referring to low libidos in women as normal, and only ever as something to ‘fix’ in men.

Franklin: We saw that when we did the episode on aphrodisiacs. Aphrodisiacs are generally prescribed to women, for “hypoactive sexual desire disorder,” and drugs like Addyi and Vyleesi are usually approved and prescribed for women. It’s that societal assumption Eunice was talking about: men are horndogs and women are frigid.

Joreth: So this brings up the issue of low libido vs. responsive libido, which are very much not the same thing. For my entire life, I thought I had a low libido because I didn’t seem to get aroused spontaneously, and I could go for long periods of time not having sex and not even noticing that I hadn’t had sex in a while.

But that didn’t quite match up with what was going on in my brain. See, also from a very young age, I have been preoccupied with thoughts of sex A LOT. I think about sex and relationships all the freaking time. So, for someone who thinks about sex all the time, I’m remarkably uninterested in it. Or, rather, I’m lacking arousal, which is not necessarily the same thing, as we’re about to discuss.

Eunice: Yeah, I have a low libido and I noticed that I can also go long periods of time without having sex and not noticing or missing it. But I can still talk about sex, and sexual ideas, without feeling aroused or actively desiring sex in that moment. That’s basically the state I was in when I wrote most of the sc-ifi erotica books with Franklin! Plus arousal and desire are not the same thing. It’s the difference between being mentally interested in sex and being physically ready to have it.

Joreth: Exactly. Once someone told me about the phrase “responsive desire” and I looked into it, everything seemed to click into place for me. I can talk about sex and think about it, but my body is not physically, sexually aroused. And then I can clinically talk about sex as an academic topic, and even as a fun and flirty topic, and still not be interested in having it. 

However, when I’m mentally receptive to sexyfuntimes happening, and then someone I want to have sexyfuntimes with starts doing sexyfuntime stuff to me, THAT’S when my body starts responding with lubrication, blood flow, nerve sensitivity, etc. And in the context of a regular partner, that can happen frequently, always in response to the sexyfuntimes, though.  Only very rarely, and in very specific circumstances, will I feel arousal with no deliberate trigger, like right after a breakup, which is something we can talk about later if there’s time.

Eunice: Yeah, there’s a difference between being aroused and desiring sex, and desiring sex with an actual person. There really are times when I just can’t be bothered with having another human around, you know? 

Franklin: Whereas my sexual experience is quite different. I’m capable of having sex when I don’t feel desire—I have an agreement with one of my partners where under certain circumstances she’s allowed to demand sex from me regardless of how I’m feeling and I’m not allowed to say no—but for most of the time my sex drive is a “touch to start” kind of thing. It goes from zero to 60 faster than a Tesla Model S Plaid.

Eunice: Oh, there have been a number of times when I told partners “hey, I’m not currently aroused but how about you get started without me and I’ll join in when the old arousal systems kick in?” because I really, really need a good long run up at the thing. It’s a pretty consistent pattern and timeframe, but I can’t just jumpkick the startup phase, y’know, I have to take the long, slow steady route. 

Franklin: And if we get distracted in the middle of the startup phase by talking about ideas for a novel, well…

Eunice: Next thing you know, we have a Google Doc with a bunch of ideas, and a bed full of unused condoms and lube and kinky sex toys. Eh, writers. 

Joreth: Right, I didn’t say I *couldn’t* have sex when I don’t feel desire. And in fact, I would say that the majority of my sex was that way, either we started first and the desire came along later, or I made a conscious decision to have sex for non-desire-related reasons so we had sex and the desire never [heh] arose. 

Now that I understand that my arousal can kick in later, I am much more able to consider “am I in a mental state where I COULD get turned on, or am I just not?” and if I am, then I can allow a partner to just start with me and I’ll catch up as long as they do the groundwork, aka foreplay. Of course, technically I can have sex when I don’t feel desire at any point during the process. I mean, I have innie parts, so all I really need is some lube, which can be store-bought. But that’s a whole other kink.

Franklin: Or set of kinks, really.

Joreth: Yes, several of which I have. 

Franklin: Oh, I did not know that about you! I just learned something new about you!

Joreth: One of the pros of a long distance relationship? We can go this many years together and still be learning new things about each other sexually? Point is, I’m very glad to have learned this phrase some years back, because it’s really opened up my sex drive. Now, instead of just saying “sorry, honey, not tonight, I’m not interested”, I can say “hmm, I’m not currently aroused, but if you do X, I could probably get revved up” or “I’m not aroused at the moment and not likely to get it up, but I’d be happy to do this act for you!”

Eunice: I don’t know whether it was a function of age, experience, or more knowledge, but being able to say to a partner “I’m not interested in having an orgasm right now, but I’d be up for helping you to one” really made a huge difference for how willing I would be to get up to sexyfuntimes.

Franklin: Or “I’m not interested in having an orgasm but I’d be up for helping keep you from having one,” as I recall.

Eunice: Only with people who like that sort of thing, of course! And you do keep coming back for it, so…

Joreth: 15 years together, Franklin…

Franklin: You are both terrible people! 

Eunice: You really seem to have a type, huh? 

Franklin: On advice of counsel, I have no comment on that at this time.

Eunice: Communication, it works a treat! That one sexy trick that they didn’t teach you in all the magazines!

Franklin: That is a really good point, though. A lot of the stuff that’s missing from pop sex advice seems to revolve around learning how your libido works and then communicating that to your partner. Magazines are so fixated on whipped cream and fuzzy handcuffs, they miss the basics: the neurobiology of sexual response.

Eunice: The problem is that they want that magic silver bullet. That one guaranteed, quick, easy solution that will 100% work every single time. And that just doesn’t exist. Unless you include an actual bullet vibe, I guess…

Franklin: Trufact: I once ordered an entire case of bullet vibes. A case of bullet vibes is more bullet vibes than you think. One of the reasons I love Come As You Are is it introduces the idea of competing excitatory and inhibitory neural circuitry that regulate sexual arousal, which Dr. Nagoski describes as an “accelerator” and “brakes.” The excitatory circuitry increases arousal, while the inhibitory circuitry decreases it. These systems are both active all the time, to a greater or lesser degree, and together they determine if you’re turned on or not.

Joreth: Which brings us back to our first episode on Aphrodisiacs. First of all, there’s no distinguishing between “low libido” or hypoactive sexual desire, and “responsive desire” in the general culture. Second, there’s the whole cultural bias about spontaneous desire being the “default” setting. So anyone who has anything that deviates from that category is looking for or is told they need that magic silver bullet to transform their sex drive into one that more closely resembles a spontaneous libido.

Franklin: Thinking about the difference between responsive and spontaneous libido, and our very different reactions to PT-141, I wonder if there’s a connection between the efficacy of melanocortin agonist aphrodisiacs and libido style. I don’t want to lean too heavily on anecdotal results with a sample size of two, but wouldn’t it be ironic if bremelanotide works better on people with spontaneous libidos than on people with responsive libidos? And I wonder how that ties into the excitatory and inhibitory circuits? If I ever get a huge pile of money, I’m going to put so many people under an fMRI machine while they have sex!

Eunice: Yeah, we’re giving you this one for free, sex researchers, just get us some usable data back!

Joreth: I would love to see a study where they screen people for responsive vs. spontaneous libidos, then double-blind give them either a placebo or PT141 and see if there are any significant differences between the 4 groups. If that did turn out to be the case, it would be incredibly frustrating, given that the whole reason why I would be interested in something like this is to make it more like a spontaneous libido, only to find out that it couldn’t work on me because I don’t already have one?

Eunice: I wonder if the pathways that PT-141 works on to kickstart the arousal are the same parts that spontaneous libidos are already using? Which would explain why that happens, if indeed it is happening. Jamming your proverbial finger on the accelerator button won’t do much good if you’ve also got your foot flooring the brake, I reckon..

Franklin: Come As You Are has a couple of quizzes designed to assess whether or not your inhibitory or excitatory systems are more active. It’s quite a simple test, but we thought it might be interesting to take the quiz and see what happens. The questions are all ranked from 0, “this is not me at all,” to 4, “this is totally me.” 

The quiz has 10 questions total and the score is out of 20 points(?) on each half – the excitors and the inhibitors.  We’re going to include our final scores and a bit of commentary here.  The entire conversation where we all took the quiz together is about an hour and a half long, so we broke that up into a recording on the excitor questions and a recording on the inhibitor questions, and both of those recordings will be made available to our Patreons.  So if you want to hear the whole, unscripted conversation, become a patron on Patreon!  Here’s the summary with our scores:

Franklin: So the scores go from zero to 20. My score on the inhibitor section is a one. So I guess that means I—

Joreth: You have no inhibitors.

Franklin: And my sexual brakes as she calls them.

Eunice: You are not inhibited at all.

Franklin: She refers to sexual brakes and sexual accelerators.

Joreth: You have no brakes on your libido.

Franklin: And the purpose of this question. I have few brakes on my libido. I do have brakes on my libido, but my brakes are not the things that she thinks they are. Brakes tend to center on: is my partner engaged as my partner active is my partner having a good time here? Do I feel safe with this partner? Have we negotiated what’s happening? Is this a context that I feel I have given informed consent to and my partner has given informed consent to? Are we all fully on board, but the things that she thinks about as brakes? Or not, the things that inhibit my libido. So what did you guys score?

Joreth: Actually, I think I scored fairly low. I expected to score higher. I got a 12 out of 20 on this. I expected to have much more sensitive brakes and I think part of the problem is, like you, Franklin, I do have quite a few inhibitors in my own brain. I just don’t think she touched him.

Eunice: Interestingly, I got 10 and that actually totally tracks with what I thought I had, which is I have medium level brakes. Brakes are not my issue, like they’re not the worst thing, but they’re also not like this means that they’re just kind of about average. My problem is that I don’t have many exciters like I have. We haven’t done the questions for the exciters yet, but my prediction for myself is that I will have a lot lower score for the exciters. I just am not getting like I’m not hitting that accelerator as much is what I predict is what I think.

Franklin: So how did we do on the expanded section? I think I scored a zero on the question about smells and I still ended up with a 14, which I guess is probably above average. I don’t know. We don’t know what the norms are for these and I got a 14 which is fairly high for the exciters and a one which is very low for the inhibitors.

Joreth: Oh, that’s true.

Eunice: I got 8/8 out of 20 for exciters, yeah.

Joreth: I got nine, so nine out of 20.

Eunice: That’s like fairly consistent for people who have a responsive libido. You know responsive libidos because quite frankly, these questions are not maybe focused in areas that would be nuanced enough for me to dig down any deeper into this. But like it for me at least, it feels pretty accurate to me that my inhibitors are kind of about like middling, but my exciters are kind of on the lower level ’cause it’s not that anything is super sensitive, it’s that it’s insensitive.

So what did we learn?

Franklin: Looking at the list of exciters, a lot of my personal exciters don’t appear there. I’m also confused about some of the inhibitors.

My takeaway from the quiz is first of all, it’s highly vanilla and mononormative. Second, I self-identify as someone with a spontaneous libido and I match the description of someone with a spontaneous libido pretty well, but I absolutely don’t see myself reflected in those questions. I think the idea of accelerators and brakes is good, but the questions in the quiz absolutely don’t fit me, and don’t describe the way my accelerators and brakes work. You can’t look at this quiz and get a good understanding of my libido.

Joreth: I’m with you, Franklin, when I read a description of Responsive Desire, I think I fit quite squarely in the description, but the questions made assumptions about sex and how we might like or not like stuff doesn’t line up. She has a very romance-novel view of sex where sex, and specifically women’s bodies, are beautiful and she wants very much for all of us to agree that this is all beautiful and that somehow sex is only going to be good once we all agree, and there is this one type of transcendent, soul-stirring sex that we should all be reaching for, and I just don’t agree. 

Biology, and humans specifically, are just gross, and ridiculous and totally inefficient, and that should be OK. There are a lot of different kinds of sex and different kinds of sensations that are not always transcendent but that doesn’t mean they’re “lesser”. There is absolutely nothing that is “beautiful” about your kazoo ball gag, Franklin – it’s silly and absurd and messy and it shouldn’t have to be “beautiful” to still have value.

Eunice: I mean, that kazoo ball gag was also hilarious. And the humiliation is a kink some people would definitely enjoy. But yeah. Her view of ‘good’ sex was…sweet, and charming, and always focused on mutual pleasure and connection. Sometimes we just want brain melting intensity and the ability to rub sweaty gross human fleshy bits together and that’s ok, you know? Or, in my case, I occasionally quite enjoy the kind of sex that isn’t intended to lead to orgasms for me, but will lead to many, many, probably way more than they wanted, orgasms for my sex partner. *cough*Franklin*cough*.

Franklin: The thing about forced orgasms is they’re the closest thing in the real world we have to ‘Blessings’ in our science fiction novels, drugs that let you change your feelings or responses to sex at will. Forced orgasms sound hot when you’re aroused, but once you’re done, you’re done, you don’t want them, and they aren’t hot any more. Which is what makes them hot.

Eunice: And that’s what makes the difference between a person who goes “I didn’t like that” and your response of “I didn’t like that, when can we do it again?” So…you’re welcome?

But back to the quiz! The fact that in a 10 question quiz there were multiple times where we debated what the question was actually trying to ask, and came up with multiple interpretations that would give different responses did not lead me to feeling confident about the answers I gave. I don’t even know if they were answering the actual questions as she meant them to be asked. She mentions:

Don’t mistake this for actual science! It’s a Cosmo quiz adaptation of the science, intended to guide you in your understanding of how your internal sexual response mechanism may influence your response to sexual stimulation, but it is just an approximation.

Now, in the footnotes she says that hers was adapted from Milhausen et al., “Validation of the Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory” and Janssen et al., “The Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scales—Short Form.” The originals are a little longer and more specific, but not by much! And some of the questions are exactly the same, or in some cases a few questions smashed together. This quick version she offers is very accurately described as a “Cosmo quiz adaptation” though — with many of the same fundamental issues and unconscious biases you often get in Cosmo magazine.

Franklin: Yeah, Cosmo tends to be mononormative and vanilla too. The problem, I think, is the idea about what sex looks like. We all carry templates around in our heads about what things are, and it’s easy to grow up in a monogamous, sex-negative society so that when you hear the word “sex,” you think “a man and a woman on a bed surrounded by candlelight engaging in missionary-position intercourse.” And if that’s the image you have, the questions you ask about sex will unconsciously lean that way.

So you end up asking questions like “If it is possible someone might see or hear us having sex, it is more difficult(?) for me to get aroused.” This really assumes that sex is private and done in couples; many people don’t have either of those ideas. And “Sometimes I feel so “shy” or self-conscious during sex that I cannot become fully aroused” is quite different for exhibitionists, where self-consciousness of the right kind can be a turn-on! There are many different varieties of self-consciousness, and some people find some of them hot. 

The quiz in the book borrows from the Sexual Excitation/Sexual Inhibition Inventory for Women, but some of the questions, like “Seeing a partner do something that shows their talent or intelligence, or watching them interacting well with others can make me very sexually aroused,” squish multiple questions together.

Eunice: Which explains why sometimes it was hard to answer her version. You’re effectively trying to answer two or three questions in one numerical response, when you might have different answers for each bit. I wonder, looking at the questions she picked and the ones she left out, whether she just selected the ones that spoke to her, and ignored the ones that she didn’t quite connect with. There’s a section titled ‘Sexual Power Dynamics’, for example, that includes questions like “Feeling overpowered in a sexual situation by someone I trust increases my arousal.” That directly speaks to a kink mindset! Like, that’s a major part of many people’s submissive preferences. And she just totally misses that entire bit of the quiz out. 

Plus there’s another bit that’s titled ‘Setting (Unusual or Unconcealed)’, with four questions in there. Those four questions are basically balanced half and half between “being caught, or being in a non-private setting is a turn on” and “being caught, or being in a non-private setting is a turn off”. That’s a typical way to try and get more accurate responses by pairing questions and comparing the answers you get to see if they’re consistent. The author has selected one of those four questions as a stand-in for that entire topic, which is fine except that she really needs to have selected one of the other questions! Because having the question “If it is possible someone might see or hear us having sex, it is more difficult for me to get aroused.” in the excitor section means that giving higher points to it is indicating the opposite of what she meant to indicate! A high score is not saying that “I get excited at the possibility of getting caught”, that’s saying “I am inhibited by the possibility of getting caught”. 

Franklin: I found that confusing, for sure. And for me, there’s a difference between “someone I trust seeing or hearing me in a consensual context,” which is neither a turn on nor a turnoff, vs “some stranger seeing or hearing me non-consensually,” which is a turnoff.

Joreth: So, there’s this other quote in the book that I liked: “It is normal to not want sex you don’t like.” Although there is more diversity among men and among women than between men vs. women, still more have women reported having a responsive libido and more men have reported having a spontaneous libido. That may be connected to the fact that heterosexual sex from the woman’s perspective is generally mediocre to bad, and if the libido is responsive anyway and not likely to start arousal first and then drive the person to finding a partner, the person would naturally not desire sex if all their sex is not good. 

I’ve had to explain to partners before that sex for women is more *expensive* in terms of risks, consequences, and even time and effort in exchange for quality, and sometimes even if I have a spontaneous desire, that desire gets ignored or suppressed because finding or initiating sex is just *not worth it*. Spend enough years like that, and that could condition someone into not having a spontaneous libido anymore, or not recognizing it. As she then says, “[P]erhaps much of what is currently diagnosed as sexual desire disorders can be best understood as a healthy response to dismal and disappointing sex.”

Eunice: And oh man, is it easy and common as a woman to have dismal and disappointing sex with cishet guys…

Franklin: Here again, though, I have a kind of “yes, but…” response. I often have sex I don’t enjoy in the moment, but I do enjoy in the memory. I think when she says “sex you don’t like,” she’s talking about something very specific, and not thinking about those of us who engage in kinks that we might not necessarily enjoy in the moment, but we still see value in anyway.

I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I have several partners who are sexual sadists, and I let them (or should I say let you?) do things to me I don’t like…because getting my partner hot is really nice. I particularly hate needle play, but I have a lover who really digs it, and seeing it get her hot is worth it to me, even though I don’t like it.

Eunice: And yet you keep coming back for more…

Franklin: Exactly! Sometimes I want sex I don’t like. I bet my experience isn’t unique here, and a lot of kinky people who read this book may feel like it doesn’t speak to their experiences.

Joreth: Yes, there is a difference here between “I did not actively receive pleasure from that activity, but I got a payout from it in another form such as a good memory” vs. “I actively disliked everything about this activity.” Like, I “like” flogging even though it hurts, but I DISlike, say, electrical play even though it doesn’t really hurt. I like rape PLAY but I don’t like RAPE. And it’s that kind of expense that I’m talking about.

Sex for people with innie parts in this culture can be expensive, with higher risk of STDs, higher risk of pregnancy, social stigma, and then tack on a responsive libido where there is *effort* that has to be made to get ramped up, and THEN add on typically male partners who don’t know how to make that kind of effort, and yeah, the sex isn’t going to be that great and it’s totally normal to not desire something you don’t like.

Franklin: True. I think it’s easy to conflate those two types of “I don’t like this,” especially when your mental image of what sex looks like is highly vanilla.

Eunice: I mean, even the sex I have that looks vanilla isn’t always actually vanilla. 

Joreth: No, kind of related to vanilla vs. kinky labels but also not, there is another concept I talk about a lot – personality types and boxes. In the book, the author makes a case for *everyone* having a responsive libido, just that some people also have a spontaneous libido in addition. She then says “Research suggests about half of women might be categorized as one or the other, spontaneous or responsive. Most people’s desire style is probably – drumroll, please – context dependent.”

Franklin: I also wonder how much of it is something people can control. I’m the poster child for spontaneous libido, but I make a point to be that way. I deliberately spend time keeping a relatively high baseline level of arousal, and intentionally cultivate a mindset where I think about sex. I do think that makes a difference.

Eunice: I’m not sure it’s as controllable as she implies? Like, if sexual orientation was a choice, surely straight women wouldn’t exist anymore! And I like men, as a rule. But oh boy, I am so glad I have a choice on the matter. Similarly, if I could choose to have a spontaneous libido, I would. That’s what the aphrodisiac experiment was about. And that’s one of the things that was so alluring about the scifi erotica world we built — that idea of being able to control my own libido with such precision. I think about and talk about and write about sex a lot, but it’s not something I’m applying to me. It’s mental, it’s not grounded in my body. I’m just not aroused most of the time.  

However, the premise of this book is that it can be controlled, by changing the context. And…I don’t know if I fully agree with that, for everyone.

Joreth:  The idea of the Desire classification being context-dependent vs. distinct categories reminds me of the most common and erroneous criticism of personality type systems. People see the systems as being mutually exclusive, self-contained categories so they either dismiss the type system outright as being “bullshit” or they make up these “both” categories that negate the usefulness of the category system. 

I am right-handed, yet I use my left hand, Quite frequently too. I don’t say that I’m “context-dependent-handed”. Yes, I get that “ambidextrous” is a category that exists, but that’s not the same thing – that means that the person can do pretty much everything equally well with both hands, not that which hand they use is “context dependent”. 

Literally everyone who has two hands uses both of them depending on context, to a greater or lesser degree. But we have a *dominant* hand that we use more often, that is stronger, more dexterous, or that can do tasks more easily than the other *even though* sometimes the other hand is better at something. Like, if I’m carrying something in my right hand, the context might make me choose to open the door with my left. That’s not the same as being ambidextrous, and I wouldn’t say that makes me “context-dependent-handed”. I’m still right handed.

These are two independent, parallel scales – one for how much you use your right hand and how easy tasks are, and another scale for your left hand. And if one scale is higher on frequency, ease of use, dexterity, etc., than the other, than we say we are that-handed *even though* the scale for the other hand also has a value.

So the fact that, on occasion, the context allows me to feel desire in a way that might be described as “spontaneous”, I don’t think that prevents me from falling into the category of “responsive libido” because creating those contexts is *work* for me – it’s something I have to deliberately go out of my way to create (or it’s an extreme situation, like a breakup, that doesn’t happen, thankfully, often). So, Franklin, your brain chemistry allows those contexts to exist more or less effortlessly and I have to build them consciously and deliberately. Like being a lefty and taking the time to teach myself how to write with my right hand.

Eunice: Yeah, this is work. Sometimes my partners think I had a period of spontaneous desire, but they just didn’t see the huge amount of preparation that I did. I’m starting anywhere from an hour to several days beforehand so that I can be ramped up enough to match their level of arousal by the time we meet. That’s still responsive, but I’m just deliberately creating my own triggers for that response. 

Franklin: So the tl;dr of our takeaways from this book are:

• Spontaneous and responsive libido are a thing, even if they’re not necessarily two separate boxes that hold two different kinds of people.

• Different people have different accelerator triggers and brakes that combine to give them either a spontaneous or responsive libido
• It’s okay to say “I want to have sex but I’m not aroused yet, so you go ahead and get started and I’ll catch up.” You don’t have to match your partner perfectly in all stages of arousal.
• Physical arousal is not the same thing as sexual interest or desire.
• Nobody is broken just because the way or the amount that you respond to sexual triggers is different to someone else.
• The current research on spontaneous and responsive libidos needs to be more aware that some people aren’t monogamous and some people are kinky, and these differences change the assumptions researchers make about what sex looks like.

Franklin: So that’s what we’ve got. How about you all? Send ideas, comments, or suggestions for future episodes to contact@skepticalpervert.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy this podcast, why not share the love, by giving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or your podcatcher of choice.  You can visit www.skepticalpervert.com to check out the show notes for the transcript. And don’t forget to become a patron on Patreon, which is linked on the website. Patrons can hear the full version of the quiz we took, where we elaborated on our responses and griped about the questions.

The Skeptical Pervert is copyrighted and produced by Franklin Veaux, Eunice Hung, and Joreth Innkeeper, edited by Joreth Innkeeper, and the website and show notes are maintained by Franklin Veaux.

Eunice:  And remember, if you’re having trouble getting aroused, you could always force someone else to have orgasms instead!

Franklin:  Right! If the other person is more aroused than you, you could try to catch up, or you could force them to have orgasms until they’re not aroused any more!

Eunice:  And if you get aroused in the process, well…

Joreth:  Give them even more orgasms!

Franklin:  What’s the safeword again?

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In part 2 of our miniseries on sex in an era of a global plague, we look at how technology intersects with sex. When you’re social distancing, how does new technology change human connection? Can it help with long-distance relationships when you can’t travel to see your lover?

Episode transcript below.

Franklin: Hello! And welcome to Skeptical Perverts, the podcast where we look at human sexuality through an evidence-based, skeptical lens! I’m one of your hosts and part-time mad scientist, Franklin Veaux.

Joreth: Hi! I’m your co-host and Renaissance cat, Joreth! I have a background in human sexuality and relationship communication, I’m kinky, solo polyamorous, on the ace spectrum, chicana, feminist, my gender identity is “tomboy”, and my pronouns are she/her but I use masculine titles.

Eunice: And I’m Eunice, your friendly neighbourhood queer, kinky, solopoly, demisexual, East Asian Brit, fully armed and ready with a cup of tea and a touch of genteel snark!

As you’ve probably guessed, this is the second part of our ‘Sex in the time of pandemic’ mini series: Sextech! Or to give it the fancier name: teledildonics.

Franklin: In this episode, we’re going to talk about something near and dear to my heart: the combination of sex and technology.

I love sex tech. I’ve always loved sex tech. I invented one of the world’s first internet controlled sex toys back in the late 1990s, a remote-controlled vibrator you could connect to your computer through the headphone jack, that used sounds to send commands to the controller.

Joreth: I still have one of those from you! It might even still work, I’m not sure, I haven’t used it in years!

Franklin: Since then I’ve connected a vibrator to a compact EEG to create a sex toy you can learn to operate by thinking about it. I’ve also built a wearable vibrator connected to ultrasonic distance sensors that will start the vibrator running when anything approaches within about four feet of you, and runs faster the closer things get–the idea behind this being you could wear a blindfold and learn to navigate just by sexual stimulation. 

Joreth: Didn’t they make, like, a belt that vibrates towards North that teaches the wearer to become sensitive to North even without the belt or something? I always wanted to try that! Franklin, you could really use something like that!

Franklin: I really could. My sense of direction sucks. I’ve also built a myoelectric-controlled sex toy, and I hold a patent on a strapon equipped with touch sensors and a signal generator so that the wearer can feel touch on the dildo.

Joreth: And I am SO anxious to try this out and see if I’m one of the people who is able to feel this! It works on the brain much the way any prosthetic works – and there’s some really fascinating studies on this! The too-long-didn’t-read tl;dr is that your brain has sort of a model of “you” in it – a 3 dimensional wireframe so to speak of your body and where you are in space. It’s called the Body Schema. Once someone wears a prosthetic for enough time, the brain learns to incorporate that prosthetic into its model, so it knows the space that the prosthetic takes up, even if it’s just a regular old, non-sensory prosthetic, but especially if the prosthetic interacts with the body in some way. 

It’s like the reverse of the phantom limb pain thing, or where you think your phone is vibrating on your hip when you’re not even wearing it. Instead of your brain thinking something is still there when it’s no longer there, your brain now starts to think that this new thing is a part of you even though it didn’t used to be. 

Eunice: Ooh, that brings up some fascinating possibilities… 

Franklin: Most definitely. Hence the Bionic Dildo project!

Joreth: We can even learn to control prosthetics that have no human analog and that the individual *never* had to begin with, like a prehensile tail! Neuroplasticity is amazing!

The really fascinating part of that research, for me, was when I learned that, in partner dancers – people who dance with a partner regularly or for a long time – their brains learn to incorporate the space that *their partner* takes up, so when it does its calculations for moving on the dance floor, it accommodates how and where the partner will be. They call this “interpersonal joint body schema”. This is the basis for my own workshop on using partner dance exercises for improving relationship communication (shameless self-plug).

Eunice: Oh that’s fascinating – I wonder if that’s why you can dance with your eyes closed with some people and have no trouble at all figuring out what they’re indicating, or where they’ll be?

Joreth: Yeah, it’s complicated but more or less! So, yeah, the strapon equipped with sensors basically manipulates the brain’s plasticity into re-mapping its model of “you” – your “body schema” – to incorporate this dildo as part of yourself so the wearer feels what’s happening to it as if it was a legitimate part of the body, right Franklin?

Franklin: Yep!

Eunice: I really want to be second on that list of beta testers, by the way!

Franklin: The age of COVID has opened up more interest in ways to use technology, and particularly internet-enabled technology, to reach out and touch someone without spreading the plague. Back when I was growing up, everyone thought the future would be flying cars. Turns out it’s a globe-spanning instant telecommunication network that lets you give the gift of orgasm to people all across the world. I love living in the future!

Eunice: So there’s an interesting study, Less Sex, but More Sexual Diversity: Changes in Sexual Behavior during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic which we’ll be breaking down in more detail in our part three of this mini-series – and oh my, you have no idea how much we have to say about it – and it includes this quote:

“While media reports suggest that the rise of SexTech is ubiquitous, it is likely that some people’s sex lives are changing more than others. For example, people living alone may be more likely to use SexTech due to limited opportunities for in-person contact. In addition, feeling more sexual desire, loneliness, and stress could potentially prompt more sexual adaptations to fulfill psychological needs or relieve negative mood states.”

“As coronavirus-related restrictions became more widespread, the popular media began reporting on putative shifts in sexual behavior, pointing to a rise in online pornography searches, sex toy sales, dating app downloads, and erotic posts on social media. This pattern, consistent with the overall integration of the internet and digital platforms into people’s sexual lives, suggests that when opportunities for the pursuit of in-person, partnered sex are limited, online and solo activities may be used to fill the void.”

Um, you think?

Franklin: Hello, Captain Obvious!

Joreth: Hmm, let’s throw in national rules that say you’re not allowed to see anyone and the existential threat of dying … I wonder what might happen?

Franklin: With the level of tech we have now, I think the COVID rules are a lot more bearable than they were when I started with sex tech. When I designed that first Internet-controlled sex toy, the Internet wasn’t really ready for that technology back then–the thing I designed was so primitive, you hooked it to the sound card on your computer and it played sounds to a DTMF decoder to control the device–so it didn’t really succeed. The Internet today is a lot more mature, so of course it’s been used to make all kinds of sex toys that are coming in really handy during this age of Great Global Plague. The internet facilitates connection of all sorts, and when you’re not allowed to see people in person, well, technology to the rescue, right? In fact, the company MysteryVibe, which makes all sorts of cool high-tech sex toys, had a 250% increase in sales thanks to lockdown.

Eunice: Cue a world where ‘virus’ now has at least three different meanings when it comes to thinking about safer sex. Do security checks on your Internet Of Things sex toys, folks! I mean, you should do security checks on all your Internet Of Things items anyway. Just cos your genitals are involved, doesn’t make it more vital. It just feels that way.

Franklin: We live in a miraculous age of vast world-spanning computer networks and miraculous sex technology, where you can buy a toy for $40 that your lover halfway across the world can use with you…but the first thing you have to do when you get it home is a security audit.

Joreth: You mean like the chastity cage dude should have done?

Franklin: Chastity cage dude is the poster child for what happens if you don’t audit your sex toy software.

Joreth: So, for those who haven’t heard about this, some poor guy was either wearing or just owned an internet-based remote controlled chastity cage, which is a metal frame that goes around a penis, in his case, that prevents the wearer from getting an erection and/or doing anything about their arousal. So he has this thing for his penis that won’t let him get a hardon, and he gets a message saying his cage is locked and it won’t be unlocked unless he ponies up a shit ton of bitcoin, because of course a sex toy hacker wants bitcoin.

Eunice: I nearly died laughing when I heard, but still, oh man, poor guy. That’s all anyone is ever going to remember him for.

Franklin: The source code for the software that hacks Internet-controlled chastity cages is up on Github.

Eunice: Cos of course it is. Welcome to the internet age.

Joreth: Hey, didn’t y’all have your own personal experience with some security issues with a sex toy?

Eunice: Oh yeah, we decided to get a toy so that I could, um, do interesting vibratory things to Franklin from all the way across the pond at 4am, as you do. I mean, 4am Franklin’s time, of course, I need my sleep! And then we tested it out when I happened to be wearing my Bluetooth headphones and…

Franklin: Yep. A security audit showed that it announced itself in Bluetooth promiscuous mode—yes, that’s actually what it’s called—so it would pair with anything. It also transmitted information unencrypted over Bluetooth. Folks, if you’re designing Bluetooth sex toys at home, remember, start with security. Like my mom always told me, she said, “Franklin, encrypt everything and never trust any user-supplied data. You can’t bolt security on after the fact.”

Eunice: Why exactly were you talking to your mother about your remote control vibrators? Actually, you know what, don’t tell me. Never tell me. So that was the last time we used that toy! Apparently they’ve patched that security hole now though, after Franklin had a conversation with the manufacturers, but I’m not trying that one again…

Joreth: Wow. Whodathunk you’d need to be concerned about internet hijacking when you’re just trying to have an orgasm?

Franklin: *raises hand*

Joreth: I mean who among normal people?

Franklin: Like anyone involved in this conversation is a normal person.

Eunice: Wait, do we even know any normal people? Aside from our parents, some of them, but again, let’s not go there kthnxbye.

Joreth: Oh, my dear mother and naively buying us Menage a Trois wine for our wedding reception. But yeah, point conceded.

Franklin: That does bring up a point: We think about tech sex and Internet sex as risk-free, but it really isn’t. You won’t get pregnant or get an STI, but you can get trapped in your chastity cage. Or have your toy try to access other devices via bluetooth which can be hijacked by others. Or have explicit images leaked. A lot of folks exchange naughty pics (according to a study in Australia, more than 37% of people interviewed have exchanged nude or sexually explicit photos or videos with a lover), and having those images leaked is a real risk. In fact, apparently it has a legal name now: ‘image-based sexual abuse.’

Joreth: That sounds like it could be a whole topic on its own! Hey, if any listeners really want us to do a deeper dive on digital sex abuse, let us know and we’ll add it to the list of upcoming episode topics!

Eunice: So to drag us back to the topic at hand: let’s talk a little bit about the history of sex and technology. I mean, using the latest technology to get your rocks off isn’t anything new. There are some remarkably filthy letters out there in historical collections – check out James Joyce’s letters to his wife Nora, if you don’t believe me. People have been writing that stuff for as long as writing existed.

Joreth: You’re right. Sex from a distance is nothing new, this is just a new way to do something humans have always done.

Eunice: So let’s go allll the way back. Paleolithic people, like modern people, wanted to get their rocks off, and guess what! Turns out some types of rock makes for really good dildos! I mean, not all types – as that infamous tumblr post mentions, “Malachite is a poisonous mineral. Please do not fuck the malachite stalactite”. 

Franklin: And of course, there were all sorts of materials used for dildos – bone, ivory, wood, you name it, they used it. Later societies explored a wider range of materials for sex toys. According to the book In Bed With The Ancient Greeks: Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, by Paul Chrystal, the ancient Greeks baked loaves of bread to use as dildos, and lubricated them with olive oil. 

Joreth: Ewww! I mean, I don’t want to yuck anyone’s food-based yum, but as someone with a vagina, I have to cringe at the idea of an oil-covered, dildo-shaped breadstick for penetration.

Eunice: Yeasty things! In places where yeast is definitely not welcome! Nooo, bad, nope, nuh uh!

Joreth: Yeasty, covered in oil so that it sticks! AND CRUMBLES! AND MOLDS! NO! Folks! Don’t put yeasty, oily, crumbly things in your lower orifices! Especially your vaginas!

Franklin: The history of sex tech is filled with dubious ideas.

Eunice: Presumably they figured that they wouldn’t know until they tried…?

Joreth: I have some limitations to how far I’m willing to experiment. The health of my vagina is one of them.

Franklin: When they switched to making dildos out of stuffed leather, that was at last a bit more body-safe. Then in 1869, an enterprising inventor named George Taylor had invented a steam-powered vibrator called the Manipulator, which had rather poor ergonomics: the business end was built into a table, with the steam engine that drove it in a different room. Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville invented the first electrically-powered vibrator very shortly after.

Joreth: Contrary to popular myth, vibrators weren’t originally invented to treat female hysteria by inducing orgasms. This myth, like the idea the human brain only uses 10% of its capacity, refuses to die. I mean, I repeated that myth myself up until basically researching for this episode – the hysteria myth, not the 10% of your brain myth – I never fell for that clearly ridiculous claim. There’s an excellent article, and research paper, by Hallie Lieberman who is a sex historian, who details not only why this is a narrative and not true history, but also why it’s a harmful myth to perpetuate.

Eunice: It’s just such a compelling myth, though. Even though it makes no sense when you start to think about it just the tiniest bit deeper.

Franklin: There’s an interesting thing about human psychology here: we tend to believe things that have good narrative value. We are a storytelling species, so a good story is believed over evidence or plausibility. And honestly, it’s seriously implausible to think a bunch of doctors were giving a bunch of women orgasms but neither of them knew what was going on.

Joreth: Being unlikely that so many people couldn’t see the implausibility of the narrative doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. This narrative draws on the underlying belief that women don’t understand their own sexuality, that we’re ignorant, passive, and easily duped and therefore we shouldn’t control our own sexuality, and that men are so completely unaware of female pleasure that the entire medical industry basically pimped itself out as gigolos without even realizing it. There’s something in that narrative for everyone and their agendas!

But the truth is that the vibrator was invented by a doctor to treat pain, spinal disease, and, of all things, deafness (don’t even get me started on the use of hokum quackery originally dreamed up to cure deafness and later turned into multi-billion dollar pseudo-medical industries that have nothing to do with deafness!). When the vibrator began being sold as a snake oil cure-all, more or less, it was for everyone – men, women, and children, to treat everything from wrinkles to tuberculosis. It was women who covertly figured out the sexual use for it.

Eunice: To be fair, historically the medical establishment really wasn’t that interested in the anatomy of the clit. However, women have been, for a long long time, and you bet many of them knew exactly what an orgasm felt like! You know what, we should talk about orgasms and such in another episode. But in the meantime, let’s jump our history forward to…modern times. Electronics! The internet! Smartphones!

Franklin: This is the Renaissance age of sex tech. Back when I tried to make Symphony, the market wasn’t really ready for internet controlled sex toys. USB wasn’t a thing, and there were no standard interfaces in common between Macs and PCs, which is why the device I developed was controlled through sound.

The advent of USB, Bluetooth, and the rise of the smartphone changed all that. Suddenly wireless chips were cheap as well, and everyone carried powerful internet-connected pocket computers that could also talk to other devices. So what happened next had a certain inevitability to it. Where the tech infrastructure exists, sex is never far behind.

Eunice: Isn’t that why VHS won out over Betamax? Because they were filming porn on VHS? 

Joreth: Yes, and they show this in the movie Boogie Nights – a cult classic really, if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. VHS was a much lower quality of recording, but so much cheaper and also held more footage – up to 3 hours compared to Betamax’s 60 minutes, so the porn industry jumped on it. They could film in far more locations, with much lower expense, and more of their viewers could afford to buy a player and the tapes. The idea of watching porn in your own home, versus a public theater, is really appealing. 

So when Sony, who made Betamax, decided to not allow their product to be used by the porn industry, that basically signed its death warrant. By the end of the 1970s, more than HALF of all VHS sales in the US were for erotic films even though a VCR cost $800 *in 1970s dollars*. 

Eunice: Holy crap, that’s a lot of money! Isn’t that like five and a half grand these days?

Joreth: The internet says $800 in 1978 is the equivalent of $3,218.40. In 1975 it was roughly $3,900. Don’t worry about Sony for losing out on Betamax, though; they made up for it by backing Blu-Ray 30 years later.

As a former film student and someone who works in the film and television and video industries, let’s just say I still harbor some resentment over losing that particular consumer war. But the porn industry has really been a huge driver in a lot of vanilla tech, actually. The drive for better and better sex entertainment has led to better video game graphics, better online video streaming, better online credit card processing, and even to the jumps we’ve taken in VR technology (that’s Virtual Reality – wearing those goggles that makes you see and feel like you’re in a virtual space). 

The next big step for VR is combining it with sex robots! 

Eunice: Wow, imagine if *that* tech had been designed in time for the pandemic. I bet being solopoly could have been really different if we could have robotic sex dolls that looked like our lovers and were controlled via virtual reality. Sex with your partners over the internet whilst still maintaining proper social distancing! Across oceans even! Or, if you’re me, more massages and cuddles. All the cuddles! Huh, I wonder how that would have changed OnlyFans.

Joreth: Just one step closer to the future predicted in Demolition Man! But we’ll be talking about sex robots specifically in an upcoming episode.

Porn drove the film industry from its inception, with the first known porn film being dated to 1896. Netflix wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the porn industry and their advances in e-commerce and bandwidth allocation.

Franklin: When I toured the Kink dot com Armory building, the only thing they wouldn’t let me see was their server room. Kink put a lot of work into developing their server infrastructure. It’s both their secret sauce and the heart of their business, so they don’t let outsiders in. 

Eunice: And sex probably helped pushed video conferencing technology to its current levels, I’ll bet, what with camming. Which we are, no doubt, all grateful for during this time of lockdown. It certainly wasn’t the Fortune 500 companies with their business meetings driving it! The very first desktop video conferencing platform with both visual and audio capacity was released in 1995, and by 1996 we get the very first solo camming site, JennyCam. And OnlyFans has, of course, gotten massive in these days of pandemic, even without the sex robots.

Franklin: Apparently those Fortune 500 companies know as little about security as the tiny sex toy companies. Microsoft got caught bungling Skype security last year when it made recordings of people’s Skype sessions available internally with no security or safeguards. Imagine the potential for abuse if an employee saw a celebrity getting jiggy with it on Skype, or if your jealous ex worked for Microsoft.

Man, you know, between poor IoT security, revenge porn, and huge megacorps eavesdropping on your video chat, maybe remote sex isn’t as safe as I thought.

Joreth: I mean, sex in general isn’t as safe as people think, but there are simple, if rarely used, safeguards that can reduce the risk potential. As we discussed in the last episode, kissing is a high risk activity, but nobody ever thinks of it like that, until now that we have a virus that can kill us for it. Wearing masks and distancing are simple and ridiculously effective tools, and look how we, as a culture, couldn’t even be arsed to maintain those simple safety protocols!

Eunice: Let’s be honest, if you’re not famous enough for people to sell your sex tapes and you, like us, have no shame…that takes out a bunch of the risks already.

Franklin: You can’t be blackmailed if you don’t care whether people find out.

Joreth: My celebrity partner told me a story on our first date about being blackmailed once, and he laughed because he had no problem with whatever it was being made public so he immediately went to the FBI, who tried to talk him out of pursuing it because they couldn’t keep it from getting out if he did, and he was like “I don’t care if it gets out, this fucker is breaking the law! Go get him and nail his ass to the wall!” 

Eunice: I guess the other alternative is the suggestion from that Shaggy song: “It wasn’t me”? That doesn’t seem very practical though.

Joreth: Like every politician now claiming his Twitter account was hacked? It’s true that the lack of shame removes a lot of risk, but we are still left open for identity theft and data hacking, like with your bluetooth vibrator.

Eunice: That’s definitely a good point – and of course, this also assumes you’re not in a place where you can be severely punished, maybe even killed, for this sort of stuff coming out. We’re lucky enough to live in fairly liberal Western urban spaces, so that’s where we’re coming from, but context matters, as always.

Franklin: But aside from that, it’s a great time to be alive.

Eunice: In some places.

Joreth: For some people.

Eunice: Assuming you don’t get your data or identity stolen. Or end up on Reddit. Everything ends up on Reddit.

Joreth: But, y’know, other than that!

Franklin: I realized about a year ago I’ve officially reached the point in my life where I’m more likely to buy a sex toy to tear it apart and use the gubbins for some other home-brew sex toy than I am to buy a sex toy and just use it. So there’s that.

Eunice: That is so very you.

Joreth: I mean, most of my gadgets and gizmos are also for the purpose of disemboweling and repurposing, but that’s for costuming stuff, not sex toys!

Franklin: I do see high potential for machine learning and sex. It might be interesting, for example, to train a vibrator on what gets them off, then push a button and get a custom-tailored experience. This is something someone is currently working on, apparently, a sensor-equipped vibrator that learns what gets you going.

Of course, like most of the current cutting-edge sex tech, this seems the sort of thing that works better on folks with internal genitalia than external.

Eunice: I’d be up for testing that…

Joreth: Ditto! As someone who has sex exclusively with people with external genitalia, and the associated cultural programming that seems to go along with it, I have a feeling it might be easier to train a toy how to reliably get me off than a person!

Franklin: Machine learning isn’t good at general-purpose abstract reasoning, but in its limited domains, it’s a lot better than the human sort. Computers already play chess and go far better than a person who’s done a lifetime of study, so why wouldn’t they be better at getting people off?

Joreth: Plus a vibrator can, y’know, vibrate and do things that the human body can’t do anyway.

Franklin: I have high hopes for advanced biomedical nanotech, though… But seriously, the idea of using machine learning to figure out how to give you an efficient orgasm is fascinating. I’d love to see data from large-scale trials. My suspicion is that no two people would be exactly the same, but we might see clusters of people with similar responses and similar triggers to orgasm. I’m picturing a scatter graph with a lot of clumps and relatively few points outside those clumps.

Joreth:  Oooh, scatter graphs!  Cuz I’m a nerd.

I did an experiment a while back to try to do the opposite. I wanted to make a vibrator guaranteed to get you aroused but not get you off, by connecting the vibrator to an EEG and a small computer that would figure out from your brain activity when you were about to come and shut the vibrator off, then turn it on again when you cooled down. I got a bunch of friends together, put them under an EEG, and had them give themselves orgasms whilst I recorded their brainwaves. It didn’t work, because it turns out the structures in the brain that mediate arousal and orgasm are too deeply buried to pick up with a surface electrode, but that was the plan, because I’m evil.

Joreth: Hey, I remember that! I was one of your test subjects! In fact, I think I helped you obtain the EEG!

Eunice: You know, I wonder if there might be a good alternative for people with external genitalia, where you measure the blood flow into the penis…because that’s probably way easier than measuring brain activity… Franklin, you have external genitalia, I have an idea for you! 

Franklin: You have many ideas for me, some of them pretty uncomfortable. But I do have to admit, that would be a fascinating experiment. Anyone got a color Doppler ultrasound machine I can borrow?

Joreth: SquiggleCon 3?

Eunice: Done! Franklin, get working. So to drag it back to the actual point of this episode: where do we think remote sex tech is going in the future? This isn’t going to go away after the pandemic, we’re all just getting steadily more connected, with lovers scattered all over the world. Whether it’s because we connected over the internet in the first place, or because people move away sometimes. So, what do we think all this stuff going to look like in, say, 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? 

Joreth: Well, I see incremental advances over stuff that we can do now – remote controlled-at-a-distance toys, video sex, hopefully some decent and easily accessible VR. There was also some talk about combining those realistic sex dolls with some remote-controlled robotics so you can have basically sex with a robotic surrogate with your lover – each of you controlling the other’s sex doll from across distance. Now THAT could be interesting! I’ve always wanted to watch a partner have sex with a Real Doll that looked just like me.

Eunice: I feel like this would be really…odd for someone with anxiety and perfectionist tendencies… Score out of ten?

Joreth: That’s probably true.

Franklin: My partner Zaiah has long said she would love to watch me have sex with a realistic doll. It sounds vaguely uncomfortable to me, treating an inanimate thing like a lover. I’m a little glad they’re so expensive, so that fantasy is unlikely to be realized.

Eunice: Ah, mass manufacture, makes everything more attainable. Even when that might not be your idea of a great evening. Give it time!

Joreth: Yep, they’re getting cheaper. Kind of the opposite of an objectification fetish. I think I have a new long-term financial goal to strive for. Maybe I’ll team up with Zaiah on this one.

Eunice: Do we need to crowdfund this?

Franklin: Aaaaaaaagh! The uncanny valley is fucking creepy! And I’m going to safeword that crowdfunding.

Joreth: We’re about to make you have sex with a mass killing, ovipositor alien, but the uncanny valley is where you draw the line? OK.

Eunice: For now, anyway.

Franklin: Sex tech. Making life better since the late neolithic.

Eunice: Well, it’s making life better for your partners, right?

Franklin: You are all terrible people. 

Eunice: Hah, why thank you!

Joreth: But back to the point (we are so good at derailing!), I think we may be on the verge of some really interesting things that we might not even be able to predict, sort of a mini sexual singularity. Obligatory Demolition Man reference here.

Eunice: So, quick fire last question: snapshot prediction of sex tech in the next decade, go.

Franklin: I see great things for sex tech in the next 5-10 years. A bunch of companies are making tiny, Internet-capable, easy to program microcontrollers—I have a bunch of them on my workbench. 3D printers make it easy to print molds for casting silicone. I see an explosion both of mass-produced sex tech and underground maker-community sex tech, and I really think it’s going to take off over the next ten years. We’re going to start seeing people doing really really cool stuff with sensors and microcontrollers and embedded systems and hand-poured silicone.

Joreth: I’m hoping this brings not only new tech, but a new acceptance of tech and the internet and of alternative relationship structures. I’m old enough to remember the days when it was embarrassing to tell people you met your partner “online” and people would come up with elaborate backstories for how they met to tell their family. Thanks to the pandemic keeping *everyone* apart, I’d really like to see more widespread acceptance of long distance relationships, of alternative ways of meeting, and of being more open about using tech as a part of one’s sexual expression.

Eunice: So the experience of the last year has certainly had an impact on the sex lives of a whole bunch of people, and my prediction is that a lot of that sex tech is going to be about increasing connection, or at least the illusion of it. If you look at the whole thing with OnlyFans, it’s clear that the reason that took off is because it was all about the interactivity. You can watch all the porn you like, but what people pay for is connection, and for their favourite performers to notice them as individuals. When you merge that desire for connection with realistic sex robots, and remote control over VR….I bet you’re going to get a whole new genre of porn.

Franklin: That I probably won’t watch because I rarely watch porn.

Eunice: But the whole point is that you’d be involved! Right?

Franklin: So to wrap up: If you’re looking at sex toys right now, here’s issues that might come up, that we’d like to see people pay more attention to:

1. Materials. You need to be choosing body-safe materials like medical grade silicone. Check the packaging—beware silicone “blends” or things with a strong smell when you open the package, they might contain volatile solvents. And don’t use silicone lubes with silicone toys.
2. Security. Most people won’t know enough about infosec, or have the right gear, to be able to do a proper security audit on their new bluetooth remote vibrator. Look for reviews that suggest the manufacturer is good with security, or not.
3. Acceptance. Lots and lots and lots of people are using more and more sex tech, especially with enforced isolation such as during a pandemic, and it’s way past time we got over our collective fear and shaming of it.
4. Usage. Using the proper toys and tools for their intended, or at least not actively unsafe, use. Use waterproof toys for the shower or bath, items with flared bases for anal play, etc etc. I mean, pervertibles are a thing. We’re not suggesting…alternative uses for objects are verboten, just make sure they’re *safe* uses for those objects. Cos nurses will laugh at you if you come into A&E with something stuck where it shouldn’t be. If you’re polite, they’ll even wait until you’re out of sight first.

Franklin: So that’s what we’ve got. How about you guys? Send ideas, comments, ways you connect during a pandemic, or suggestions for future episodes to contact@skepticalpervert.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy this podcast, why not share the love, by giving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or your podcatcher of choice. You can also visit www.skepticalpervert.com, where you can check out the show notes for links to the transcript and the studies we’re drawing from. And don’t forget to become a patron of the show by joining our patreon, which is linked on the website. The Skeptical Pervert is copyrighted and produced by Franklin Veaux, Eunice Hung, and Joreth Innkeeper, edited by Joreth Innkeeper, and the website and show notes are maintained by Franklin Veaux.

Joreth: And remember to have lots of kinky VR robot sex!

Franklin: The uncanny valley makes me sad.

Eunice: And you’ll make kinky VR sex mistress sad if you don’t play. You don’t want to make her sad, do you? Mwahaha.

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Aphrodisiacs! What are they? Are they real? Is there, in fact, something you can take to make you horny? In this episode, we explore aphrodisiacs, the mythology around them, the scientific evidence (spoiler: every food or supplement that’s been tested in double-blind studies has failed), and the new class of melanocortin-agonist aphrodisiac drugs.

In this episode, we discuss aphrodisiacs and our own experience with bremelanotide, the first aphrodisiac to pass double-blind clinical trials. Transcript below.

Franklin: Hello! Welcome to Skeptical Perverts, a podcast where we talk about 2 of our favorite things – logic and sex! These two things don’t normally go together, especially in our society that’s hostile to sex (and, frankly, to logic and reason and science as well), so we want to do something about that. I’m your host and part-time mad scientist, Franklin Veaux.

Joreth: Hi! I’m your co-host and Renaissance cat, Joreth! I’ve spent a number of years in several different schools studying a bunch of different subjects, one of which was human sexuality and relationships. I’m kinky, solo polyamorous, on the ace spectrum, chicana, feminist, my gender identity is “tomboy”, and my pronouns are she/her but I use masculine titles.

Eunice: And I’m Eunice, your friendly neighbourhood queer, kinky, grey-ace cis woman and polyam community organiser, bringing the East Asian British viewpoint and a touch of genteel bewilderment!

Franklin: Before we get started, you should know this podcast is probably not safe for work, unless you have a really interesting job. You should probably also be over 18 to listen. We talk frankly about human sexuality from an evidence-based perspective. In this, our first episode, we’re going to turn a skeptical eye to…aphrodisiacs!

Eunice: So firstly, what exactly is an aphrodisiac? 

Franklin:  An aphrodisiac, named unsurprisingly for the Greek goddess Aphrodite, is anything a person can take to cause sexual arousal. People have been looking for the perfect aphrodisiac for a long time. Lots of superstitions have grown up around things to make people horny, from powdered rhinoceros horn to oysters to squashed bugs. Often, if it looked like genitals, the ancients figured it worked on genitals. But until recently, none of them have worked.

Joreth: Years ago, Penn & Teller did an episode on their show Bullshit! on aphrodisiacs that I highly recommend, and they covered a lot that we’re going to mention here. One of the reasons why we want to start with aphrodisiacs, though, is because all 3 of us have personal, first-hand experience with them that we wanted to share. However, this leads us to the first thing that we need to, as the title of our podcast says – be skeptical of! 

Eunice: Wait, how exactly are we defining ‘skeptical’, here?

Joreth: Well, the word “skeptic” comes from the Greek word “skeptikoi” meaning “seekers” or “inquirers”. It’s not about doubting or debunking anything, it’s more of a toolkit or a way of looking at the world. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you are cynical, it doesn’t mean that you’re a doubter, it means that you are open to inquiry and that you inquire rationally about all of the things that you’re talking about.

Eunice: Absolutely, and I want to make it clear that this is why we look for scientific studies. It’s not that personal experience means nothing, but the plural of anecdote is not data – evidence isn’t only a bunch of first hand experiences. Not even ours! You really need good, solid studies with a decent methodology and lots of subjects – preferably double blind studies, they’re the gold standard, right?

Joreth: Yes! The whole reason the three of us decided to try the aphrodisiacs that we did is because there is scientific data behind them, but, because we *do* have first-hand experience with one of them, we can bring that experience into this episode to share with the listeners! If we had only our experiences alone, that would not be good enough to reach our conclusions. Anecdotes are not data, but they can be good for *illustrating* the data.

Franklin: So first, a little history. From the dawn of time until about 1962, every aphrodisiac ever invented by humanity…didn’t work, except as placebo. Of all the various potions and pills people invented to make themselves horny, all of them, without exception, failed double blind tests.

Eunice: And before we go any further, a double blind study is one where neither the participants nor the researcher knows who gets the placebo and who gets the real deal. 

Joreth: Yep! If a test subject in a study knows what they’re getting, that knowledge can influence the outcome. It’s not quite “mind over matter”, it’s more like “I want to be a good research participant, so I’ll massage my responses to what the researcher wants to hear” – and that’s mostly subconscious, not deliberate. So then, if the researcher knows what the recipient is getting, they could accidentally taint the results by giving away clues that let the recipient know what they’re getting. Then, the only way to get untainted responses is for nobody to know who gets what and then just see what happens without anyone’s subconsciousness influencing their reporting of the subjective results.

Eunice: So we mentioned placebos before – does anyone want to give a quick overview of how placebos and the placebo effect works?

Joreth: There are some pretty big misconceptions about what the placebo effect is. Most people think it’s a kind of form of “mind over matter”, meaning that if you think a medicine will work, then it will actually fix you. But that’s not what the placebo effect does. The placebo effect is “the psychological manipulation of subjective experiences on non-specific symptoms”. So, put simply, it means that nothing about the body actually changes – if you broke your leg, the leg is still broken. You just don’t mind the pain quite so much.

Franklin: Y’know, I hear morphine does that too. Although morphine actually works. For some people, anyway – apparently I’m weird and it didn’t work for me. When I burned my foot, it just made me violently sick.

Joreth: Yeah, it’s usually a little more effective than that for most people. So a placebo is a subjective experience, but the objective problem is still objectively a problem. In a 2001 meta analysis of clinical trials with placebo groups and no treatment groups, they found no evidence for a placebo effect on objectively measured outcome, and a possible small benefit in studies with continuous subjective outcomes like pain. In a 2004 and 2007 follow up analysis, they found similar results plus increased evidence of bias in smaller trials that calls into question the apparent placebo effect on subjective outcomes.

[insert P&T clip re: placebo effect of aphrodisiacs]?

Eunice: So when it comes to aphrodisiacs, the placebo effect means that just because you subjectively think you’re getting aroused by, say, ingesting ground up tiger penises (can I say, eww, and also those tigers could make way better use of those penises, just saying), it doesn’t mean that you will actually become aroused by any physiological metric, right?

Joreth: Correct.  You’re *thinking* about sex and thinking about getting aroused (which is why you snorted dried animal schlong in the first place, or whatever), so you start getting aroused because you’re thinking about sex and getting aroused, but the powdered cat dong isn’t what’s doing it for you.

Eunice: So anyway, back to Franklin’s quickfire history of aphrodisiacs, before we get sidetracked again. We are super good at this keeping on track thing, aren’t we? 

Franklin: Well, people have been looking for aphrodisiacs for a long time. Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote that people ate lizard skins as aphrodisiacs in ancient Rome and Greece. There are a lot of foods that are supposedly aphrodisiacs – raw oysters, for instance, which are actually kind of disgusting, 

Eunice: Hey, I dispute that! Citation needed.

Franklin: Strawberries, chocolate, figs, garlic of all things (I can’t imagine, y’know, being turned on and then having garlic breath, but, whatever), 

Eunice: Have you seen the amount of garlic I eat? It’s never stopped you.

Joreth: So I’ve definitely heard of the oysters, strawberries and chocolate. I’ve also heard of green M&Ms, and ground up insects from South America, y’know, like Spanish Fly?

Eunice: Wasn’t that an irritation thing? And that caused inflammation and swelling on the way out of the body, which led to erections? Doesn’t sound pleasant but maybe peeing blood in the emergency room is your idea of romance, which, no judgement.

Franklin: The pangolin, a type of anteater, is being hunted to extinction for traditional Chinese aphrodisiacs, which are made from pangolin fetuses–I swear I am not making this up. And rhinoceros horn is considered to be a magic aphrodisiac and a cure-all by a lot of people, and it’s one of the reasons why black rhinoceros, rhinoceri? black rhinoceros are ending up extinct!

Joreth: A lot of people who know me *now* might not believe this, but I’m actually just a tree-hugging California hippie at heart. When I learned how many of my alternative supplements I was taking were actually directly causing the extinction of wild animals and destroying the natural ecology of Asia, Africa, and South America, I was pretty pissed off!  And they didn’t even work! I hate being suckered.

Eunice: Yup. But then, humans have a looong history of being suckered, so you’re not alone. So, what about non-food aphrodisiacs?

Franklin: Well, there’s a common aphrodisiac that’s the pheromone perfume which is made from pig saliva – you see this shit all over the internet. Pheromones are hormones that influence behaviour outside the body, so yes, they are actually real things. A lot of animals, mostly insects, use pheromones for everything from scent trails to mating, and so there are some folks that think that anything that works on bees and rabbits must work on people too. It’s not totally clear to me why we think that pig pheromones would work on humans. I haven’t heard of very many cases of pig farmers, I don’t know, being driven mad by lust for barnyard animals or something, but I suppose people have all kinds of kinks.

Eunice: Well, there’s a reason that human flesh was called ‘long pig’. We have a lot of physiological similarities, after all. We taste pretty similar to pork (apparently). We could even do transplants on humans with organs taken from pigs, if we wanted.

Franklin: So Penn & Teller actually did a really really clever experiment a few years back where they wanted to evaluate whether or not pig pheromone cologne actually caused heightened sexual response in humans and it was really well set up. They used a couple of identical twins and one of them was given a pheromone spray and one of them wasn’t.

Joreth: I love this episode. Now, I don’t always agree with Penn & Teller, but what I do love about them and their show, is that they’re just a couple of guys who ask questions. That’s pretty much the definition of skepticism. They don’t rule things out automatically, they ask if it’s true, and they form their opinions based on the evidence. 

And that’s another trait of skepticism – when the evidence comes in, you accept it. You don’t keep asking questions for the sake of being contrary or to keep pushing until you can prove the conclusion you want to be true. The whole “I’m just asking questions to settle issues with scientific consensus” is not skepticism, it’s denialism.

Eunice: Yeah, we’ve been seeing a lot of that recently.

Joreth: Anyway, in episode 6 of season 1, Sex Sex Sex, Penn and Teller get to aphrodisiacs about 17 and a half minutes into it, starting with food [insert P&T clip]. 

So this is a great example of Confirmation Bias. Even though she says that she doesn’t believe they existed, she used her own observations in a way that does not eliminate personal bias to form her conclusions. Eye witness anecdotes are notoriously awful for accurately evaluating reality.

Eunice: And we’re no different! We’re using our experiences as personal examples to illustrate the things we see in the research, not suggesting that our experiences are more accurate than the studies that are out there, even if we had different results than the subjects of those studies did. There could be a thousand things we’re missing, due to confirmation bias like Joreth mentioned before, or other confounding factors. 

Joreth: Yeah, so right after that bit, about 20 minutes into the episode, we see the pheromone test. [insert P&T clip about the twins test] 

Franklin: And there it is, Mr. Confounding Factor!

Joreth: So apparently it’s a good thing to get sloppy seconds?

Franklin: Well, your kink is OK, I’m down with that.

Joreth: I’m betting that the women in the test were just primed because of the first dude, so the second dude seemed to get hotter now that they were all bothered by the first dude. The pheromone cologne had nothing to do with it. 

Franklin: And yet this stuff still sells like crazy. I see it all over the internet from like $8 a bottle up to hundreds of dollars a bottle! And what’s really interesting about that is there is this MIT researcher named Dan Ariely and he actually did an experiment that showed that more expensive placebos had a bigger purported effect than cheap placebos. So I wonder if that means that hundred dollar pig drool brings more ladies to the yard than $8 pig drool does?

Joreth: Hey, pig drool is natural, so natural things are good right? That’s how the Appeal to Nature Fallacy says it works anyway – give up all processed and man-made stuff and stick to organic and “natural” foods?

Franklin: Of course, arsenic, cocaine, and botulism are also natural, on the other hand computers, sanitation, eye glasses, and ibuprofen are all artificial and guess which ones I would rather be exposed to? There are people, speaking of cocaine, who do think that cocaine is an aphrodisiac?  Same for amphetamines, alcohol, and those things can actually have an effect on your sexual performance, of course, cocaine and amphetamines are both stimulants so they jack up your nervous system until it’s about ready to fall out of your body, and alcohol can reduce inhibition, but they’re technically not aphrodisiacs.

Eunice: So, are there actually any real aphrodisiacs?

Franklin: Well, moving closer to present day, 1962 was a good-news, bad-news year. The good news: scientists finally discovered an aphrodisiac that worked. The bad news: it only worked in rats. The aphrodisiac, α-Melanocyte-stimulating hormone, or α-MSH, works on melanocortin receptors in the body and brain. α-MSH was originally investigated as a sunless tanning agent. The idea was to stimulate the process in the body that causes the skin to darken when it’s exposed to ultraviolet light. When given to rats, it had the unexpected side effect of making them horny.

Joreth: Ooh, I wouldn’t mind a good sunless tanning agent! I am a California girl, after all! I do like my tan, but I don’t so much like skin cancer!

Franklin: Right? The marketing possibilities are endless. Anyway, fast forward to 2005, when a researcher named Mac Hadley injected himself with a peptide similar to α-MSH and ended up with an eight-hour erection.

Eunice: Can I just say, 8 hours sounds super uncomfortable, and I don’t even have external genitalia. 

Franklin: Right? Development of melanocortin-receptor drugs for sunless tanning met with mediocre success, but in 2006, a small pharmaceutical company called Palatin Technologies started exploring the idea of α-MSH-like drugs as aphrodisiacs. They developed a drug called PT-141, or bremelanotide, which became the world’s first aphrodisiac to pass double-blind studies in humans. 

Joreth: Yeah, it started out as a nasal spray, which is kind of a weird idea if you think about it: “here, put this up your nose, it’ll get you hot!” 

Eunice: Let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing people have tried…

Franklin: In 2007, the FDA shut down clinical trials, officially because they were worried about PT-141 increasing blood pressure, anecdotally because the Bush White House didn’t like the idea of an aphrodisiac drug.

Eunice: Eh, Republicans. They’re so repressed. And I’m saying that as a Brit, with a political ruling class who practically wank over Maggie Thatcher every night.

Franklin: As a result, weirdly, bremelanotide is the first true aphrodisiac to be discovered, but not the first to be approved. Flibanserin, sold under the brand name Addyi, is a serotonin agonist approved to treat hypoactive sexual disorder in 2015, albeit with a long list of warnings and drug interaction precautions and two failed previous attempts at approval in 2010 and 2013. It has not been a market success, as it works on only about 10% of people who take it.

Eunice: So what’s the difference between the two? I assume they work in different ways? 

Franklin: Bremelanotide and flibanserin work in completely different ways. Flibanserin is a serotonin agonist; biochemically, it works much the way hallucinogens like psilocybin and LSD, some antipsychotics, and some antidepressants work, just on different receptors in the brain. 

Bremelanotide, on the other hand, is a melanocortin receptor agonist. It stimulates expression of melanin, the pigment in skin that causes tanning, but weirdly also seems to stimulate dopamine in the medial preoptic area, which is involved in the sexual behaviour of a number of animals, though the exact mechanism by which this happens isn’t well understood.

Joreth: Yeah, so in 2014, Palatin Technologies started new clinical trials for bremelanotide, only this time with an injectable version, and it got approved to treat “female hyposexuality disorder” just a couple of years ago in 2019!

Eunice: Or more formally known as either Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in women or Sexual Aversion Disorder. Can you hear me grinding my teeth right now?

Joreth: Yeeeaaaahhhh…. So let’s talk about this for a minute. Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, or HSDD is where someone has no libido, basically, and Sexual Aversion Disorder is where someone has an active distaste for sex and sexual activity. Both are listed as a *pathology* by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or NCBI and the National Institutes of Health – which more or less means that if you have no libido or a dislike for sex, then there is something *wrong* with you and you are broken. Rather than, y’know, lack of desire merely being part of the vast diversity that is the human sexual experience.

Eunice: I swear, if I keep gritting my teeth this way, I’m gonna need to go back to the dentist. Anyway, for anyone out there who is experiencing this situation in their own life: firstly, this is not an issue that makes you broken. Or weird. Or unable to be loved or in relationships or any of that…rubbish. And secondly, it doesn’t only affect women, or even only people with vulvas. 

Franklin: Plus have you noticed that women are considered pathological if they’re too horny or not horny enough?

Eunice: Welcome to the female experience of society?

Joreth: To be fair, the International Society for Sexual Medicine actually says the words “Hypoactive sexual desire disorder is a troublesome condition in which women lose interest in sex.” and “HSDD is chronic and causes great distress for both women and their partners. A woman may not know why she’s lost her sex drive. Her partner might become frustrated and worry about the fate of the relationship”. It’s important to note that “distress” is considered an important criteria for a “disorder” diagnosis. If someone is not distressed by something, then even if they have that thing, it’s generally not diagnosed as a disorder. 

Eunice: Yeah, but distress is such a socially determined thing, right? Cos ‘I’m distressed because society tells me I’m broken for not wanting sex’ isn’t treated any differently from ‘I’m really frustrated because I love connecting with my partners through intimate sexual activity and I’m not getting any’.

Joreth: Exactly. Notice that “her partner might become frustrated…” is part of the description. Although I am someone who cares about my partners’ happiness and satisfaction, my partner being frustrated about my libido has always been a much bigger problem for me than my lack of libido was itself. According to the diagnosis, if I’m distressed over my partners being frustrated with my lack of desire, then that makes it pathological.  MY pathology, MY disorder. 

I think it might be better to treat it as a social issue that my partners can get so upset at MY lack of sex drive, that their upset interferes with or inhibits my life to such a degree that doctors are willing to pathologize my stress at my partners being upset about what’s going on with MY body.

If my partners in the past had put less pressure on the success of our relationship resting on my willingness to have sex, then my lack of libido at various times wouldn’t have bothered me much at all. 

Franklin: And what’s weird about that is Palatin Technologies originally sought FDA approval for bremelanotide for men, since it gives you an erection in addition to making you horny. They wanted to market it as a competitor for Viagra. But the FDA approved it as a drug to treat low libido in women. 

Eunice: Huh…now I’m wondering how they would approach a situation where someone has only lost the taste for PIV (or penis in vagina) sex, but they’re otherwise up for other types of sex. Cos I gotta say, as a bisexual woman….I have so many other options. In other words, dudes: up your game! With other people, I mean. I’m kinda ok with taking a moratorium on new cishet guys for a bit. Oh! I’m wondering if there’s another episode in that. Maybe like, 3 episodes.

Franklin: Going back to aphrodisiacs, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that Viagra is not an aphrodisiac. A lot of folks don’t really understand the difference between aphrodisiacs and anti-ED drugs. Bremelanotide is not like Viagra. Viagra doesn’t make you horny.

Viagra works on the walls of blood vessels. It was originally intended to be an antianginal drug, not a penis pill. It interferes with an enzyme in the body that regulates muscle tone in the walls of blood vessels, which reduces blood pressure and also, as it turns out, allows blood to flow into the penis more easily, causing an erection. But it isn’t, and never was intended to be, a libido-enhancing pill.

Eunice: So Franklin, what actually happened when you took PT-141, and how was that different to when you tried Viagra?

Franklin: Now, PT-141 doesn’t work for everyone – only about 25% of users in clinical trials reported a noticeable effect on libido – but Bremelanotide, as it turns out, works really well on me. I tried some bremelanotide from a custom peptide supply house as a nasal spray first, which didn’t do anything at all. Then I tried it as an injectable, and man, it worked like gangbusters.

At first, I didn’t think it’d work. Half an hour after I took it, nothing. An hour after I took it, nada. I was like, oh well, guess I’m not one of the folks it works on. And then, wham! It started with my face and hands feeling hot. Then I got a monster hard-on out of nowhere. And then it hit like a truck. We’re not talking ordinary garden-variety sexual arousal here, we’re talking horniness that would make a bishop kick a hole in a cinder-block wall. There was nothing subtle about it. In fact, the far-future science fiction erotic novels I’ve written with Eunice, starting with The Brazen Altar, have a drug called the Blessing of Fire that is a powerful aphrodisiac, and the descriptions of what it feels like in the novel comes from my experience with bremelanotide.

Viagra, on the other hand, gives me a hardon that doesn’t go away, and decreases my refractory period, but it doesn’t get me hot.

Joreth: Eunice, you took it too, didn’t you? What happened to you?

Eunice: Before I go into any detail, I should caveat that I took what we later found out was a super low dose. About a 5th of the normal dose, in fact. Via nasal spray too, which like Franklin found, is typically less likely to be successful. And what I experienced was…drumroll please…absolutely nothing. I’m still rather annoyed by that, it would have been really interesting for me to experience an arousal that didn’t take me, like, an hour to crank into life for the first time in rather a lot of years. But yeah, nothing happened. Absolute zilch. And that sucked. What about you, Joreth?

Joreth: I consider myself on the asexual spectrum. I have what’s called a Responsive Libido, which we’ll cover more in-depth in another episode. But the short explanation is that my body doesn’t generally feel sexual arousal spontaneously. Usually sexual stuff has to start happening and then my brain goes “oh, that’s right, we like this! OK body, fire up the engines!” It has taken me most of my adult life to figure all the peculiarities of how my libido works and how to make it work for me.

So when Franklin told me there was this drug currently in Phase 3 clinical trials that I could obtain that seemed to jump-start arousal, I was pretty excited at the idea of having deliberate control over my libido. My body rests in an “off” state by default, and then it takes me forever to get ramped up. If I could take a drug, say, when I know I’m having a date with my partner who I enjoy connecting with through sexual activity, and that drug could make me aroused in time for the sexyfuntimes? Hell yeah, I wanted to try it!

Eunice: Yeah, as someone who has also been functionally grey-asexual for…oh, a bunch of years (and 2020 has definitely not helped with that), I was really excited by the possibility of being able to control when my body felt arousal, and with whom. I’m not distressed by not having sex. I’m distressed by not having control over when my body wants sex. Or, well, doesn’t want, to be more accurate.

Joreth: Yeah, unlike the descriptions of pathological sex disorders, I’m not distressed by not being interested in sex. I’m distressed at not being able to *choose* when I have a physiological response to sex, and I’d like the option to be able to “switch it on” at will.

Eunice: It’s a matter of agency, right? Getting to control your bodily responses, the way that people with penises can control their erections with Viagra – and don’t think we didn’t notice how much sooner Viagra was commercially available than anything for women!

Joreth: Yep, women’s arousal and excitement is pathological in part because our partners are distressed by it, but our arousal is also not really *necessary* for sex, whereas, apparently, a hard penis is, so that’s the drug we got first. End sarcasm.

Eunice: I gotta say, I get a feeling that for certain types of people, the lack of female arousal during sex was a feature, not a bug…

Joreth: That’s probably also true. It’s an interesting dichotomy to live under – if we don’t feel arousal, it’s distressing for our partners, but if we do feel arousal, especially if we don’t have a socially sanctioned partner, that’s also a problem.

Franklin: Of course, for some of us, when we do feel aroused we are distressed by our partners, often vigorously and for extended periods of time. I won’t mention any names… *ahem* Eunice *ahem* Joreth *ahem*.

Eunice: ‘Distressed’ is a very strange way of saying ‘screaming in pleasure’.

Franklin: Sure. Pleasure. We’ll go with that.

Joreth: So, having control over my own libido as a way of taking some control over my agency is important to me. I determined the lowest dose and highest dose from the various studies and embarked on a “scientific experiment” of my own. First I tried the nasal spray at the lowest dose and not only did I feel no arousal, I felt a prohibitive amount of pain from the spray – I have never been able to tolerate nasal sprays.

So I immediately switched to the subcutaneous injections at the lowest dose, and no response. I continued to up the dose in regular increments, with no response, until I reached the highest tested dose, when I finally got a reaction! It made me so violently ill for 24 hours that I couldn’t even ooze off the couch and crawl into the bathroom to vomit and I had to set a pot on the floor next to me so I could vomit off the side of the couch.

Eunice: Bloody hell, that sounds awful!

Joreth: Yeah, it was as bad as the worst flu or cramps I’ve ever had (and I have endometriosis – which is another episode we should do sometime), but it both started and ended as if someone threw a switch – bam! I was sick and then nearly exactly 24 hours and I was suddenly immediately better. I did, however, get an awesome tan on the days that I took the too-low doses! I’m thinking I may get some more and work on my tan deliberately!

Eunice: Well I guess that’s….something? Doesn’t sound worth the vomiting, I’ll be honest.

Joreth: True, I’ll have to stick to the lower doses. I didn’t get a tan on the day I was sick, but mainly because I didn’t see daylight for an entire day. It’s interesting how it affects different people in different ways.

Franklin:  The FDA report on the clinical trials does suggest that nausea is more common if you take more than 8 doses in a single month, but that severe nausea often goes away over time if you keep using it. And some anecdotal reports suggest that regular use may lead people who initially don’t have a response to eventually start responding with consistent doses.

Joreth: After all of this, I’m quite disappointed that it didn’t work for me. I was really looking forward to having some control over my libido. But, since I’m already interested in going back on the drug at the lower doses for its tanning properties, maybe I’ll see what happens if I use it consistently at a lower dose?

Eunice: Yeah, same – disappointed, but since I got a super low dose before, I’d be up for trying again, over a longer period of time, and seeing if I can ramp up the effects to ‘ooh look something’s happening’ rather than ‘hey is this thing even on?’.

Joreth:  But perhaps after the pandemic gets under control so that maybe we might actually have some partners around to use this thing with?  Y’know, in case it works?

Franklin: So, after looking at the studies and trying it ourselves, here are some questions we are left with…

• PT-141 is only modestly effective, working in about 25% of people to create arousal in FDA double-blind studies (though it works on about 80% of men as an ED drug). Addyi works in about 10% of people who try it. Are there possible aphrodisiacs that are more effective?

• What’s the difference between people who respond to PT-141 and people who don’t?
• Will effective aphrodisiacs lead to people generally pathologizing asexuality? Will people feel pressured to take them to keep their relationships?
• Could aphrodisiacs become date rape drugs?

So if you happen to have come across studies we missed that answer any of these questions, we’d love to hear from you! Send links to studies, feedback, comments or suggestions for future episodes to contact@skepticalpervert.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy this podcast, why not share the love, by giving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or your podcatcher of choice.  You can also visit www.skepticalpervert.com, where you can check out the show notes for links to the transcript and the studies we’re drawing from.  And don’t forget to become a patron of the show by joining our patreon, which is linked on the website.

Joreth: Thanks for hanging out with us for Episode 1 of The Skeptical Pervert! We’ll be back next month with episode 2: sex vs kink. 

Eunice: Remember to be perverted with your skepticism, not skeptical about your perverts! 

Franklin: I don’t even know what that means!

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Good day, and welcome to our show, eh? In this episode, we introduce the Skeptical Pervert podcast. Who are we, and what is this all about? What do we mean when we say we take a rational approach to human sexuality?

In this episode, meet your hosts Franklin, Joreth, and Eunice, and find out a little bit about what we’re trying to do! Transcript below.

Franklin: Hello! Welcome to the new Skeptical Perverts podcast! I’m Franklin.

Joreth: Hi! I’m Joreth! 

Eunice: And I’m Eunice.

Joreth:  This podcast takes a look at human sexuality from a perspective of empiricism and rigorous skepticism.  More on that in a bit.

Franklin: First, let’s take a look back at the history of the Skeptical Pervert. Joreth and I thought up the idea in late 2009, as a vehicle for bringing some rigor to discussions about sex and sexuality. We’ve talked quite a lot about launching the podcast since then, but we’ve both been busy and life kept getting in the way.

In the grip of a globe-spanning pandemic, we found this idea rattling around in the Box of Many Things that is our shared ‘projects we’d like to do’ list, dusted it off, said “Ooh, you’re shiny!” and started work again. Especially considering we are living in a world where critical thinking is less and less common, and people are taking medical advice from Facebook memes written by Russian trolls and soccer moms rather than doctors—and calling that “skepticism.”

Eunice: And that’s when I accidentally wandered into this whole shebang and didn’t say no fast enough! So, what are some of the things you’re likely to hear us explore during the course of this podcast?

Joreth: Ooh, we have so much to talk about!  What are aphrodisiacs? What is “sex tech” and how is it used?  How do people have sex during a pandemic?  What, if any, are the differences between so-called “male” and “female” libidos?  Kink vs. sex?  Is porn harmful?  Sex offender registries. … the list just goes on and on!

Franklin:  Basically, we want to take a close look at myths, urban legends, “common sense”, and other ideas about sex and see if they’re true, and how we know that they’re true (or not true).  We take what’s sometimes derogatively called a “reality-based” approach to questions about sex and relationships and we wanted to share that approach with you, dear listener!

Eunice: Now, you might be wondering — what’s our backgrounds? Our experiences? Where are we coming from in all this? I know it can seem like every random person with a microphone is starting a podcast these days. 

Joreth:  Yeah, like, who are we to be talking about science and sex on a podcast?

Eunice: OK, as you’ve probably already guessed, this is an 18+ podcast, so warnings galore right here — we discuss some pretty adult topics from a rather personal point of view sometimes. We do not shy away from our own investigations when the occasion calls for it! 

Joreth:  Yep, we’re going to dive right in with frank and candid discussion of biology, chemistry, and personal experience.  And between the three of us, hoo boy do we have some experiences!  We use adult language, both in the sense of discussing sexual activities and body parts by their appropriate names and also using grown-up slang.  So, Franklin, let’s start with you.  Who the fuck are you and why are you talking about sex and science?

Franklin: Who am I? I’m a kinky, polyamorous, seasoned veteran pervert. That means I enjoy BDSM activities, like dominance and submission and letting my partners do things to me and such. I have multiple partners in multiple long-term relationships, all of whom know about each other and sometimes conspire with each other. 

Eunice: You’re welcome!

Franklin: Beyond that, I’m pretty typical—I’m a cisgender straight white man, which is treated as pretty much Standard Western Human version 1.0 in a lot of ways. I am comfortable in the sexual and gender identity I was assigned at birth, and with he/him pronouns. I’m interested in and sexually attracted to women, but not men, which I consider a bug rather than a feature. I can’t be attracted to men even as an abstract thought experiment. That means there’s a huge vast part of the human sexual experience I will never know. If someone invents a magic pill that can turn straight people bisexual, I’d take it in a heartbeat!

Joreth:  I’d totally be down for that!  The existence of straight women is the best evidence ever that orientation is innate, not a choice.

Eunice: I can confirm it’s just a way to get rejected by multiple genders?

Joreth:  Good point!

Franklin:  I’ve been a sex educator since the mid-1990s. I’ve had a rich and varied sex life—I lost my virginity in a threesome, which gave me a long-standing fondness for group sex.

I am a writer by trade. I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, both self-published and professionally published. In fact, Eunice and I are four books into writing a five-book series of far-future, post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica.

Eunice: Well, five books for now, but who knows how long it’ll be by the time we’re finished!

Franklin: I’m a dedicated mad scientist with a fondness for tentacles. I hold a patent on a sensor-equipped strap-on dildo that allows the wearer to feel when it’s touched. I design and make sex toys, mostly involving tentacles, sometimes involving the xenomorph facehugger from the Alien movie (thank you very much for THAT nightmare, Joreth!).

Joreth:  My pleasure!

Eunice: You know he loves it, he keeps coming back for more!

Joreth: Your logic is unassailable.  I very much look forward to creating a whole new category of nightmares for you next summer with that facehugger harness!

Franklin: You people are terrible. Ahem. Anyway…I thought doing a podcast on skepticism and perversion would unite two of my favorite things, science and sex! Eunice, who are you?

Eunice: Well, I’m a community organiser, project manager, trainee therapist, author, sex educator — I basically do a load of random bits and pieces, mostly because I’m really bad at saying no. 

Joreth:  Ah, the achilles heel of the community organizer!

Eunice: I’m also your friendly neighbourhood queer, kinky, grey-ace, demisexual, bisexual,  solo-polyamorous, cis woman and I’m the British East Asian part of our little trio. 

Now, I just threw a whole bunch of terms at you, so let’s go through them one by one, shall we? Firstly, I’m queer — well, I’m certainly not mainstream, and since I’m so many things it’s easier to just go for the most inclusive label I could find. Franklin already gave a little info on what kinky means for him, but for me it’s all about having a mindset of playfulness and openness and creativity whilst exploring sensually. Not necessarily sexually, mind.

Franklin: “Playfulness.” That’s one word for it! Other words might apply as well, like ‘fiendishness’ and occasionally even ‘terrifying.’

Eunice: Didn’t I say you have a type? You keep finding out that people you like are…”differently moral”. 

Joreth:  I need to put that on a t-shirt.

Eunice: Anyway, next up: grey-ace, demisexual, and bisexual, now here we get into some interesting terms! Grey-ace means I’m on the asexuality spectrum, although not fully asexual, and therefore I don’t really respond to sexual desire and arousal in the ways that society seems to expect me to. Demisexual means I need to have connected with a person emotionally and mentally before I can be sexually attracted to them — usually the thought of being attracted to them doesn’t even come up in my brain before then! — and bisexual means, for me, that I am attracted to people of most genders, although these days I lean towards fewer cishet men and more of everyone else thankyouverymuch. I’m aware it can mean something slightly different for various people, and some people would call me pansexual instead, but this is my label. 

Next on the list is solo-poly, which means that I have multiple consensual, loving relationships but I don’t want to financially, legally, or residentially entangle with any of my partners. Autonomy is very important to me.

Franklin: I’m starting to lean toward solo-poly myself, now that I think about it. When I first met both of you, you were both solo poly and I was much more entwined poly, but I think you might be dragging me over to your side!

Joreth:  We have cookies!  Er, well, I suppose “cupcakes” in my case, but, y’know…

Eunice: Mmmm, cookies….you’re making me hungry! So, cis just means that I identify with the gender that was assigned to me at birth, which was ‘female’. And finally, I’m British and East Asian, specifically Chinese. Both of those, of course, mean that I tend towards understatement. Phew, that was a lot! What about you, Joreth?

Joreth:  Well, I’m kind of a Renaissance man.  And since I also have an unusual gender identity, that phrase fits.  My identity is “tomboy”.  A tomboy is usually depicted in the United States as a person of the female persuasion with strong masculine tendencies.  She acts and dresses and even sometimes looks like a boy, but she doesn’t want to *be* one, she just thinks that girls should be treated like boys too if they want to be.  In popular culture like movies, she also tends to be sexually attracted to men.  That all feels like me.  To that effect, I use feminine pronouns like she/her but I use masculine titles like “sir” and “cameraman” (which is my actual job title) and “dude” and “master” and “you guys”.

Eunice: Also “badass who should be ruling the world”. But maybe that’s just my opinion.

Joreth:  I also strongly identify with feral cats.  I tend to see myself as a cranky black alley cat who wants food and attention, but only when I want it and the way that I want it.  So maybe I’m more of a Renaissance cat?

Franklin: Ah, that explains a few things! I never could resist a cat.

Eunice: We all know you’re a cat slave. Every cat you’ve ever come across knows you’re a cat slave. As in a slave to cats, not a slave who…is a cat?

Joreth:  Can you have a chaosbunny who is also a slave to cats? 

Eunice: Eh, he’s prey, they’re predators? 

Franklin: Hey now!

Joreth: As a Renaissance cat, I have a very diverse set of interests and skills.  As the saying goes, “jack of all trades, master of none”.  I majored in several different disciplines at various times during my academic career including sociology and human sexuality, and I also tend to deliberately take part-time side jobs in industries I have never worked in before just to learn something new.

I’m also kinky, solo polyamorous, on the ace spectrum, chicana, and feminist.  To me, kinky means that I explore sex with a curious attitude that blurs lines between sex and non-sex things.  I have a whole list of other labels that fit under the “kinky” umbrella, and we’ll get to know some of them as the show goes on in later episodes.  

I have multiple romantic partners simultaneously all with their full, enthusiastic, informed consent who also have other partners of their own while maintaining my independence within my relationships.  I have a whole blog post describing what “solo poly” means to me if you want more on that, but Eunice covered it pretty succinctly for me too. 

I consider myself on the asexuality spectrum because I have a somewhat complicated relationship with arousal and attraction that we’ll explore in an upcoming episode.  I am of mixed ethnicity that includes indigenous Mexican tribal ancestry, and through a long and complicated sociopolitical movement, the term “chicana” was reclaimed to describe my in-between-heritages state.  And I am feminist, which means that I believe in full equality among the genders is necessary but some genders are not treated equally yet, so I focus on lifting up those genders to the same level as the dominant classes.

Eunice: Ooh, yes – I hope it barely needs to be said, but we stan feminism on this podcast, and will not be taking questions at this time.

Joreth:  Yep, not up for debate.  I’m also a community organizer, public speaker, trainer of public speakers, video engineer, and dancer with a background in ballroom, Latin, swing, and Bollywood.  You see why I call myself a Renaissance cat?

Ugh, I am wordy.  Honestly, I can spend forever trying to explain who I am, so look me up online if you really want more.  Let’s move on.

Eunice: So, why are you both skeptics? Other than the whole state of humanity kinda needing more of that right now, I mean.

Franklin: I am a skeptic because I want to know how the world works. The default position when someone tells you something really ought to be “Oh really? Why should I believe you?” Skepticism is a way of looking at the world that starts with the idea you shouldn’t believe something simply because someone says it’s so. That’s not enough. If you believe things without any reason to think they’re true, your brain fills up with clutter and junk. Next thing you know, you’re believing that Satanic pedophiles are selling sex slaves from the basement of a pizza shop that doesn’t have a basement just because some anonymous guy on a troll board said so. That…isn’t a good way to understand how the world works.

Joreth:  Yep, as the slogan goes, skepticism is the intersection between science education and consumer protection.  Basically it means that it’s in all of our best interests to just question things so that we don’t buy into a bunch of hokum and nonsense that could harm us.  Skepticism isn’t about doubting.  It comes from the Greek word, Skeptikoi which means “seekers”.  A skeptic doesn’t say “naw, that’s not true”, a skeptic says “hold on a minute, IS that true?”  And then provisionally accepts the answer in light of the evidence.

Eunice: Sex and sexuality is one of those areas that tends to throw people’s brains into a morass of basic instinctive responses, childhood conditioning, and confused assumptions based on vague messages from the society around us. So, our aim is to apply that skeptical lense onto an area that so often doesn’t get explored properly, and hopefully digging out the gems of real information from the…sewage. That means that a lot of what we use as resources are scientific papers and the like. We know that there are still issues of replicability and publication bias and human error or prejudice, but so far this is the best we got. Some of this information may well turn out to be incorrect or incomplete later, with the benefit of new research, but hopefully it will be mostly accurate. And, of course, you shouldn’t take our word for it either! Look up our sources, read them for yourself – we’ll link all the papers, articles, and books we reference in our show notes. 

Franklin: You can find us at skepticalpervert.com.  send us ideas, comments, or suggestions for future episodes to contact@skepticalpervert.com.We hope you’ll tune in as we get this podcast rolling. We plan to look at a whole lot of aspects of sex through a skeptical lens, from aphrodisiacs to relationships in the time of pandemic (you know, because there’s a pandemic going on) to kink to Tantric sex. There’s a lot of fairy tales, weird myths, and disinformation about sex floating around out there, and a lot of hucksters willing to take people’s money on the back of it (spoiler, no pill will make your penis bigger). We want to cut through some of the rubbish.

Eunice: Future episodes will be a bit longer, but not a whole lot more. (I lie, you just won’t hear most of the rubbish.)

Franklin: And if you know someone else who might enjoy this podcast, why not share the love, by giving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or your podcatcher of choice.  You can visit the site to check out the show notes for the transcript. And don’t forget to become a patron on Patreon, which is linked on the website. The Skeptical Pervert is copyrighted and produced by Franklin Veaux, Eunice Hung, and Joreth Innkeeper, edited by Joreth Innkeeper, and the website and show notes are maintained by Franklin Veaux.

Joreth:  And remember…Why settle for a skeptic or a pervert when you can mash the two together!

Eunice: Would that be a skepvert? Or a pertic? Wow, those both sound dreadful!

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