How to Deal With the Fear of First-Time Sex

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There is a lot of anxiety that people feel if they haven't yet had sex and their peer group has. We're taught to sort of think of first-time sex as a place to get everything perfect or right but that's not the reality. There was an American psychologist who did some very interesting research trying to look at how different people conceive of virginity loss. She divides the group into three either you believe um virginity is a gift to be given ohYou've either you think it's a stigma to be lost or you're in this third group who just thinks first time sex is a right of passage. They were also often not honest about their virginity status with their partners.

In this episode, Hannah is joined by Sophia Smith Galer, who is an award-winning journalist, author of Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, and Tiktok creator. Sophia unpacks the main sex myths she tackles in her book from virginity to the hymen, and also shares how she identified the gap in social sex education to start with. She and Hannah talk about Sophia’s journey into becoming a TikTok journalist as well as social media’s censorship of sex education and how Sophia hopes SexTok can continue to help us and the next generation with sexual, mental, and physical health. Finally, Sophia shares a personal story of vaginismus, and Sophia and Hannah discuss why sex education should never come from just one person.

CW: discussion of consent nuances, consent withdrawal, and non-consensual sex. (roughly between 22 - 24 minutes). A brief mention of self-harm.

✨MORE ABOUT SOPHIA SMITH GALER ✨
Sophia Smith Galer is a multi-award-winning journalist, author and TikTok content creator with over 100 million views on the app. Credited with pioneering TikTok journalism in the UK, she has been named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list this year for her work as well as in Vogue's list of 2022's 25 most influential women in the UK alongside Emma Raducanu, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and HRH Queen Elizabeth II. As a Senior News Reporter at VICE World News she has covered everything from gender violence and technology to the climate crisis and Europe's Christian hard right, and this year published her first book debunking what she has branded a worldwide sex misinformation crisis. Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century is out now, debunking sex myths surrounding virginity, penetration, virility, sexlessness and consent. The Evening Standard, who called Sophia a 'Face to Watch' in Books this year, said: ‘It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder, ‘why wasn’t this written before?’ It could change lives.’