The Longing Lab Journalist and author Rachel Hills discusses the sex myths society sells us
Episode 35 Feminist journalist and author of The Sex Myth, Rachel Hills discusses what she’s learned about sex as a source of power, the sex myths many of us believe, and how the sexual revolution didn’t really liberate us. Hills also highlights the social pressures she personally felt not having sex until her mid-20s.
Rachel Hills is a feminist journalist and non-fiction writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She began her career contributing features and opinion pieces to the Sydney Morning Herald in her native Australia in her early 20s, going on to write for publications across six continents, including The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Fusion, The Guardian, The New Inquiry, The New Republic, New York Magazine, New York Times, TIME, Vogue, Washington Post, and more. Rachel’s first book The Sex Myth is about the invisible rules and assumptions that shape the way we think about sex. Her second book, The Whole Mother, looks at how we can liberate motherhood so that women don’t feel like they need to choose between having a child and existing in the world as their full selves.
Follow Rachel on her Heart Talk Substack: https://rachelhills.substack.com/
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:
*The impetus for writing The Sex Myth
*The most common myth she discovered doing research for the book
*How labels both serve and harm us
*Why trust and kindness could be the key to true liberation
*Ways in which we are encouraged to avoid emotional vulnerability in society
*The optimistic and realistic view of motherhood her new book The Whole Mother
Quotes
“The core of the sex myth, similar to the beauty myth, is this idea that the way that we engage with sex reflects who we are and reflects our value in the world.”
“The fact that I was not having sex was kind of my greatest source of shame... I felt like it was this big secret that I was carrying at the time that I could not share with anybody because if I did, I felt like that would change the way that they thought about me, from what I hoped they perceived as being an attractive, fun, well-liked person and progressive feminist to…a loser, unattractive, and secretly conservative.”
“When I was working on the book and talking to people...they would often say to me in a kind of confession-esque way, ‘Oh, you wouldn't believe…my sex life is really unusual.’ And then sometimes they would say to me the thing that seemed the most usual thing ever.”
“If I'd lived in a different sexual culture—not just in terms of the ideals, but in terms of how people treated each other—perhaps I would have felt more able to have had sex outside of a loving relationship—not for my first time, perhaps, but later on. If I knew that I could have sex with somebody in a casual sense, and they would treat me with respect and kindness the next day, then that would be amazing. And frankly, it would be hugely liberating.”
“One of the myths within The Sex Myth is that older millennials, like myself, had been sold this idea that we were now liberated. But in fact, what we had been sold as liberation was a new set of standards, and in some ways, a new form of oppression, or at least regulation.
“As I look at what happened in the history of the sexual revolution and its consequences over the last 60 years, the problem is…it made the ideal to be to say, ‘yes,’ but it didn't necessarily make it physically safe to say yes, emotionally safe to say yes, pleasurable to say yes. It didn't always allow you to say yes and keep your inner sense of humanity intact.”
“We're told that if we want to be mothers and have a life outside of motherhood, that is an unrealistic [and] selfish desire, that it's not inherent to what motherhood is. But