Ep 53 with Emma-Louise Boynton

Ailey Jolie: 00:00

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the potent power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body. I'm Aile Jolie, and today I'm joined by Emma Louise Poynton, the creator and host of Sex Talks, an award-winning live event series that often sells out, a podcast, and the inspiration for Emma Louise's first book, Pleasure, coming out in May 2026. A book which explores how women have been systematically disconnected from their bodies but also their sexuality. Emma Louise's path to this work didn't begin in a classroom or a research lab, but began in a sex therapy room at twenty-eight, where she was finally able to name what her body had been trying to tell her for sixteen years. Since the age of twelve, when her experience of an eating disorder began, Emma Louise had been at war with her body, living outside of it, unable to access pleasure or connection of any kind. Sex therapy became the doorway back to her body. And it also became the personal reckoning that led her to create sex talks and all of the work that she offers today. Today we're exploring what it actually means to come home to a body you've been taught to hate, to reclaim pleasure as a radical act, and to unlearn the shame that keeps so many of us numb, silent, and small. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. So, as someone who already knows a little bit about you, which is why I wanted to have you here, I know that you started sex therapy around the age of 28, and I would love to hear from you what led you to walk through that door.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 02:33

It's so funny going back to that time because it honestly feels like I was a different person. It's like a different lifetime. So I was 28, as you said. So it was like five years ago when I actually went to a dinner party. I was working, I used to work in news and current affairs, so I was like very much not in a sex and wellness space at all. I was very kind of newsy politics head, considered uh things outside of politics like, you know, quite extraneous and fluffy. And it was we were covering that period, we were coming in and out of the pandemic. And I'd been running a kind of women's events um series as well, and doing some kind of journalist stuff in the background as well. But was in this period in my life where I was kind of in between lots of different things and just feeling quite disconnected generally. And I mean the pandemic threw off all of us, and I think particularly anyone with history of mental health issues. So I grew up with quite bad eating disorder. The pandemic had been tough.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 03:23

And I was we were in one of those pockets of time when we were allowed to venture out into the world and I went to this dinner party, and I never spoke about sex because sex was taboo in my life and in my household growing up. We did not talk about sex. My sex education at school consists of two things: don't get pregnant and don't get an SDI, followed by an incredibly graphic video of a woman giving birth, fashionally, which looked so painful it was enough to drive anyone to a life of pious chastity, honestly. So my discourse around sex was non-existent. However, this one evening at a dinner party, I started talking about sex with the girls at the table. Uh, I think it was the anonymity of being with a group of people I didn't really know that well. And for whatever reason, we started talking about sex, and I was just like, Yeah, I'm actually just not a sexual person. I don't really like sex. And I admitted them, I was like, I actually haven't been able to orgasm in about five, six years. And for me, that just it wasn't a big thing. I just like I'm I'm not sexual. You know, some people are, some people aren't. And the two women sitting on either side of me were horrified. And they they kind of looked at me aghast and they said, wait, what? Like, you know that's something that you can fix. And I was like, sorry, fix. Like, no, no, no, I I I just I'm not a sexual person. They were like, no, no, no, no, no. This is something that you can like work on. This is something that you can actually like, you know, help to uh to to heal if that's something you want to do. As it transpired, both of them had been to see a sex therapist called Alex Triculio, who's previously based in um Australia, and they had become evangelicals for the cause. It had she had really helped both of them work through, I can't remember what their specific sexual issues were, but they had had kind of similar issues uh as I had. And they said, you have to get in touch with Alex. Like, please just do one session, see if you like her, and if you don't, it doesn't matter. And I took her number and I was like, fine, cool, whatever. Didn't really think about it. Following week, I spoke to my friend Charmeline Reed, who runs the amazing Stack World. And I was doing some writing for her anyway with the Stack. It was just newly launching. I told her about sex therapy, and I said, you know, I might do it. I think kind of, you know, whatever. Like what nothing to lose. We're in this like weird kind of in and out pandemic, like I'm, you know, not sitting with anyone, not seeing anyone. But actually, maybe it could be quite interesting to see if this is something I can't actually work on. And she had the very good idea, she always does. You should write a column about this called Conversations with My Sex Therapists. Now, I love a business incentive to do anything. I struggle with indecision in a really profound way. And for me, having a business incentive to drive me to do something is incredibly helpful for kind of narrowing my options and being like, right, there's something in a focus on. So I was like, great, I love it, I'll do it. So I started sex therapy, honestly, like probably two weeks later. And I mean, I went in thinking that it was as simple as I don't like sex, I can't orgasm, you know, I'm broken. Because I thought I was broken. I really did. I thought I just didn't work, my body didn't work as it was meant to. And I thought I would go in, she'd tell me to masturbate, she'd get me to get a new bullet, and I'd write this column and that'd be it. Dumb dust it. I had no idea that this would prove to be such a huge turning point in my life. I say that because, you know, I say it jokingly, but actually it really is quite a kind of profound realization because I was so disembodied that I thought it was fine that I was disconnected from my body, that I couldn't experience orgasm, that I wasn't connected to my sexuality in any meaningful way. And I don't just mean that in a partner context. I didn't have any sort of sexual, erotic connection to myself. And I didn't think that was a problem. I thought that was absolutely fine because who needs a body? We live online anyway. You know, I was stressed, I was working, I was busy, you know, my connection with my body didn't matter. And I think just hearing myself even say that now, I'm so like it's it's crazy because we get one home in this life, and that is our body. It can't and when this body is gone, you're out. That's it. And so I think looking back at the headspace I was in that allowed me to believe that that level of disembodiment was not a problem. I'm so struck by that. And, you know, obviously you know, suffice it to say, sex therapy put me on this very new trajectory of beginning to recognize how profoundly important the way we connect to our body is. And it was never just about sex in the way of like fucking. It was about how do you connect your body sensually? How do you connect your body sexually? What is your kind of capacity for eroticism? And so it opened up this whole new dialogue, I guess, with myself and my body that I hadn't had any sort of connection with.

Ailey Jolie: 07:49

Two questions come to mind, but I'll ask this one first. What were some of the events prior to that that you think had led you to be so shut down or so unaware that you can have that type of rich embodied experience or be connected to your life force energy if we use more depth psychology language, which is that erotic, creative place of vitality, if there were specific events, or if you can look back and just go, actually, nowhere in my life had I seen that.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 08:17

No, there was a really big disconnect for sure. So I so like so many young women, I grew up for the rebuttal eating disorder. So I'd been from about kind of age 12. So I was really young. I went to more girls' school, and anyone who's gone to an independent girls' school in London, and I'm sure across the world, will know they are hotbeds for eating disorders. And I developed um from bulimic birth, and then I was anorexic from about kind of 13 to 15, like quite badly. Like to the point I was, you know, I mean it's awful, you know, get diagnosed and they tell your parents, like, yeah, so uh it's actually got the highest mortality rate of any uh mental health issue. So um, yeah, she she could die. And you know, I was 12, 13 at the time, it was awful for my parents. And of course, I don't know to what extent it's changed now. Then it was treated as a physical ailment, as though I had broken my leg. And it was like, okay, so what she needs to do, she just needs to eat this, you know, list of things, this list of foods, and she'll be fine. There was no recognition of the extent to which a eating disorder is a mental health issue. I think our language around mental health is up has, you know, expanded so much since then. But obviously being treated as though you have a broken leg when you have a quite a profound mental health issue is not exactly putting you on a course to recovery. So I was kind of in the midst of this eating disorder for quite a few years in that kind of primary adolescent period, and eventually did began begin to get physically better at around 15. Actually, because my school said they were gonna have to suspend me because it looked so bad having an anorexic girl walking through the school gates because of the reputation of Gar Schools of being this sort of thing. Real lack of duty of care, but funnily enough, it was actually the thing that kind of tipped me to being like, oh my god, I'd kind of like lost everything. I didn't really see friends, I didn't do anything, my grades had dropped because I was just so tired. Anyone who's experienced anything kind of similar, you just, it's so all-consuming. And I was so tired. And at that point, I kind of stood back and was like, I have lost everything that makes my life meaningful. If I get asked to leave school, I they basically said, you know, you don't have to leave until you get better. The thought of sitting at home just with my own thoughts and my own kind of war with myself was such a frightening thought. It was kind of a thing that kicked me into being like, right, something has to shake, change. But because I'd never really grappled with the mental health side of things, it was always the kind of physicality of the illness. I never really mended that relationship to my body. I just put on weight and ate a bit more, but still had kind of quite disordered eating habits and hadn't made peace with my body in any real meaningful way. But because the physical side of things had begun to like ease from an outside perspective, everyone was like, great, you're better. And I was like, great, I'm better. And I think it allowed me for kind of the years following that to keep up this quite tortured relationship to my body in secret and continued being bulimic, you know, well into my late, late 20s and and until I went to sex therapy actually. And it would have moments, it didn't take over my whole life, but it was this kind of private battle that was always occurring behind closed doors. And something that if you met me, you would never guess, but was this thing that kind of it's hard to show up as a whole version of yourself when you are at war with yourself in the privacy of your own home. And so I by the time I got to sex therapy, I'd kind of, as I said, in out of the pandemic and that had been a really tough time. I'd been really relying on bulimia as my kind of coping mechanism. But I always spoke of eating disorder as something that had happened. So this was in when I was 13, I had an eating disorder. When I was in my teenagers, I had an eating disorder, and there was no recognition that this was something that was still part of my life. I really just did not acknowledge that. And as a result, I didn't address it. And you know, I'd I you know, try to do a bit of therapy, being like, God, I should probably like try and sort this out. But it was not, I didn't, I quit therapy. I would soon see a therapist for three sessions, I'd quit. I'd be like, oh, I'm fine, I'm

Emma-Louise Boynton: 12:10

fine, fine. I don't need this. Um, I found the labels really difficult. And I think because, yeah, I mean you know, you try and find the therapy that works for you and not everything is gonna work for you that that you know works for people. Going to sex therapy was the first time I was given a new lens through which to see my body and the eating disorder. And rather than being a lens of even like mental health, eating disorder, parental issues, it was through the lens of my body and through the lens of pleasure. And so when I I think it was literally in session number one, Alex asked about what is your, you know, first of all, what's your kind of relationship to sex been like historically, but also what is your relationship to a body like? And that's when I think she was probably one of the first people I admitted to. I was like, well, actually, it's not great. And if I'm being really honest, I kind of I do this thing, I'm a bit blemick, but like, you know, it's not a big deal, you know, it's just, you know, it just happens inside. It was so, I was so disassociated to that kind of facet of myself. And she said something to me that honestly like shifted my perspective like nothing else. She said, Emma, for as long as you are at war with your body, you are going to struggle to enjoy sexual pleasure. And when she said that, I was like, ha, okay, this is interesting. I had never, ever considered my connection to my body as being an inhibitor of pleasure. I didn't see pleasure, just wasn't part of my lexicon. I saw my body through the prism of punishment and pain. It was something that I needed to discipline in the gym. I needed to, you know, strict diets over. I needed to, you know, be sick when I ate too much. It was just, I was, as I said, at war with my body. And so when she put forward this idea of that being a barrier to experiencing pleasure, it was honestly like someone just like gave honestly gave me parablasts, or it just shook me and was like, you know how this is affecting not just like your own inner, you know, workers of your mind and your kind of elements of your day-to-day. This is actually affecting your capacity to experience the depth and breadth of pleasure that your body can facilitate. And that for me was a turning point. I I never looked back after that. That was like, okay, this is actually something that I do need to work on. So I think going back to your original question, it wasn't obvious to me where that disconnection had happened until I went to sex therapy. And I was, I guess, forced in the context of addressing my issues around sex to reckon with my issues around my body and to see for the first time how interconnected they really were.

Ailey Jolie: 14:34

There's one part of me that's really saddened that no therapist before that, specifically coming with a history of Letter Bean eating disorder or disorder eating, isn't asking that question. Like, what's your relationship like to your body? But I also know that happens often. And that sex therapy in a very sneaky way is also kind of, as being a registered sex therapist, I know it's kind of like this little hub of people who are like embodiment, like let's be in the body, and it's got that tone to it. And I would just love to hear a little bit from you around what that process was for you of actually allowing yourself experience pleasure or what some of those blocks were. Because even though we can know, okay, I am at war with my body, I'm trying to come home to my body, I want pleasure. There's so many cultural elements, they don't even have to be personal, that stop that process or slow it down or minimize it or justify why it's irrelevant. And I would just love to hear from you how you maybe worked through some of those pieces for the listener who's like, oh, this sounds deeply like me.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 15:30

And I actually will say on the first point of that, I went into sex therapy saying I'm broken and I don't think you'll be able to fix me. And I thought I was very much alone in that. I thought my experiences around sex were unique to me because I didn't talk about sex. So my only engagement with the topic of sex was light touch. Oh, a friend just shyed this guy, oh, a friend went on a date, and it was seemingly they had this like friends would just be able to have sex with people, not experience an anxiety that seemed for me characterized my connection to sexuality. So I very much thought the issues I experienced were unique to me. As soon as I started doing sex therapy and writing this column, I had so many women tell me that they too had an eating disorder, that they too were disconnected from their body. And I realized that point, I was like, oh my gosh, this is this, we're so alone in this, but together because we don't talk about sex. And I think sex really is everywhere now. It's so across TV and marketing, and you know, it's become so much of our, I guess kind of integrated even like through social media into our like everyday parlance. We're so confronted by sex, very, very narrow, um, I think quite reductive view of what sex is that doesn't give us the language to really analyse our own experiences of our connection to sex and sexuality and erotism and bodies. So I just want to say that first up for anyone who's listening and who feels a learning what they're going through. You are so not alone. In fact, kind of depressing me, you're an excellent company, which I think at a broader level is quite a frustrating thing to acknowledge because it's so many people generally and women specifically become disconnected from their bodies because of the society we live in and the pitiful conversations we have around sex. There is something very comforting and knowing that you're not alone in this. And thus there are so many tools that you can pick up and conversations you can be a part of that can really help on that like healing journey. So, to go to your question, which is a really good one because yeah, it's very it's easy now, years later, to turn back and be like, this one line changed me, and then I turned around and suddenly I could orgasm. And of course, that wasn't the process at all. And I think when I look back on it, it was a couple of things. I think the first piece is in some ways the simplest and also the hardest, and that was around shame. And, you know, I said before when I turned up at the sex therapy room, I didn't talk about sex. It was not something that I talked about with really in-depth with friends. I mean, as I said, it'd be like, oh, I shied this guy. And I would be like, how can you do this without being anxious? But I'd be like, cool, amazing. But it was never like, you know, an in-depth conversation about like, hey, I actually can't orgasm, I'm feeling it's anxiety. So there was no real conversation that I felt able to participate in. And I think also I never spoke to people I had sex with about sex. I mean, it's ludicrous. I think Emily Nagoski talks about the fact that like if you're not able to talk about sex, you shouldn't be having it. And I fully agree. If you're not able to articulate your needs, your desires, your boundaries in any way, shape, or form, and parts you don't know them, like pull back. Like you need to figure those things out, I think. But a lot of this was down to shame and around shame that I think is so culturally ingrained in us to feel about sex and our sexuality. And I think that part that is that dissonance between the kind of cultural representation of sex and a kind of sex is fucking on Love Island, da-da-da, versus the like day-to-day nitty-gritty of the vulnerability of sex, the the issues that do come up in sex. I think it is such a confronting space, being so intimate with someone. So much comes up in sex. It's your connection to your body, it's connection to your gender, you know, it's connection, it's your family issues. There's so much that comes up in this incredibly intimate environment that means sex is never just about sex, it's about so many other things. So I think the first piece was having to rid myself the shame that it historically characterized my understanding of and connection to sex. And that honestly was uh why I say it was kind of the hardest but also the simplest thing. By virtue of just having conversations about sex week on week or month on month, or however often we did our sessions, and then writing about it, I just got in the habit of talking about sex and like a kind of muscle that you I hadn't exercised my entire life. It was very weak and flabby. And then I began exercising it in these therapy sessions, and then, you know, that bled out into the rest of my life. I began talking about it to people around me, talking about my experience, going to sex therapy, writing about it in this column. And as a result, that shame began to dissipate because I think I began to just get used to being comfortable talking about something that had historically felt so taboo. And I think that was a really big thing of being able to rid myself of that shame. And as I said, also knowing that I wasn't alone in it. So I think the shame piece is a really important one. It was then reframing my connection to my body. So where I'd seen it always being, I'm in a battle with my body, I'm at war with it. It was like, okay, what does it mean to make peace with my body? And I don't really subscribe. I think body positivity movement has been amazing, but I also think for anyone who's had an eating disorder, waking up every day and being like, I love my body is really hard. And also I think sets quite an unrealistic expectation. But for me, I'm really big onto body neutrality. How do I just make peace with my body? How do I not sit at war with it every day? And that was a kind of slow process, but it was one of really, I guess, the perspective shift of being like, okay, you need to put down your armor with your body and just be able to be still with it. And I think it's kind of that stillness because I'd always been so busy running around, kind of distracting myself from my body because I didn't want to feel it. But as soon as I began to slow down my body, and my therapist would say, you know, I want you to seduce yourself, I want you to spend your time, you know, you don't have to rush straight to orgasm, but let's spend time with your body that's not rushed, that's slow and that's sensual. It doesn't even have to involve masturbation. Have a long bath, light a candle, be still and slow with your body. It sounds so simple, but I had never wanted to have baths. I didn't like seeing my body underwater because that was a real, like, made me feel very uncomfortable with how I looked. But slowing down and going through these like kind of slow sensual processes allowed me to sit back in a body I'd been running from for so many years. And that was really profound. So I think slowing down, sitting with my body, and I think I had to stop making myself sick to be able to sit with my body in that way. And again, this is gonna sound simple, but when Alex reframed or like talked through my connection to my body with me, she really labored the point that like you have to be your best carer because no one else is gonna care for you in the way that you really need to be able to have a flourishing relationship with the body. And she really put a lot of onus on the need to kind of look after myself in a, you know, properly and look after my body in a respectful way. And I just had never really thought about my connection to my body in that way. I just never really, yeah, I guess I spent so many years running from it. And I think once that mental shift had happened, I honestly felt like, you know, to be graphic, like when I would go to make myself sick in that process, I was like, oh God, this is really not cool. I don't like treating myself like this. I don't like being my own self-abuser. This no, I think just even having someone shine a light on that and be like, this is self-abuse. I was like, whoa, this isn't, you know, it's like bringing the like dark secret into the light. And suddenly you're like, oh, I see this for what it is. This is not cool. And that, you know, I I said this before, but it that process in that period of doing sex therapy, I stopped making myself sick for the first time in 17 years, and I've never gone back to it. I've never been bulimic since. So that was a really big shift that had to happen. Final point I'll make on this, on this question, because I think it is a really important one, is I have to, so to kind of sum that up, I had to make peace with my body. I had to slow down, slow down and spend time with my body. Then I needed to get to know my body. I had no idea what turned me on. I had no idea what my desires were. I had always shut down this facet of myself. You know, people would ask me a few times when I'd had, you know, sex previous years, you know, what do you like? What do you want me to do to you? And I'd be like, oh, it's a great question. I would like to turn it back to them because I didn't know how to answer it. I had to figure it out. What do I like? And that was, I mean, you know, in part, that was beginning to like read and have these conversations with Alex and engage with like sexual material to kind of figure out, like, yeah, what does Tammy on? What do I want? What are my boundaries? And also self-pleasure. Like, what feels good? What environment do I need to be able to orgasm? So I kind of to sum that all up, I'd say make peace to but peak peace in your body, be still in your body, get to know your body, and sexual desires and fantasies. Those were kind of the four things that shifted my connection to my body and kind of took me back to my sexuality.

Ailey Jolie: 23:56

I know that the book that you have upcoming is part memoir, part cultural critique. And I would love to just spend a few moments exploring maybe some of the cultural critique that you have that you can see. These are the things that allow women to treat their

Ailey Jolie: 24:12

bodies like this in silence or to be at war in their bodies and to think it's totally, absolutely normal, and to not flag it as anything potentially harmful, or to not flag it as like maybe that's in the category of an eating disorder or disorder eating. Maybe I'm not so recovered. You know, I would love to just kind of hear from you, and they could be personal, but I also know that you have that wider frame and you spent time developing it to share some of those pieces.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 24:39

Totally. So a couple of things that I go through in the book. I, you know, begin the book talking about sex and the beauty myth, because obviously, for me, the like origin story of my disconnection and reconnection to sex with a brown body image. And I, if anyone who hasn't read it, Naomi Woolf throughout this brilliant book in the early 90s called The Beauty Myth, which really analyzed how women are turned against themselves, against one another, through really narrow, prescriptive beauty ideals that compel us to really see our bodies as projects that we have to constantly work on and we're constantly like running up against. And I really love her framing around it because women are we put on a pedestal the disciplined woman who is perfected and curated and you know, her body is snatched. And we prioritize discipline over joy, discipline over pleasure. And then it's just so culturally ingrained. I mean, we we've seen now we have the return of the you know heroin chic look that's being kind of seen as aspirational for women to look re-emaciated again. And I'm always conscious with this. I never want to body shame anyone. I think I'm even, you know, seeing the discourse around wicked premiere coming out, that might date us, sorry, actually. But even though, you know, I I think it's easy to um, I never want to be someone who kind of uh critiques the wider um culture when it comes to reductive beauty standards by zooming on any one woman or any like body type, not at all. But I do think there still remains a big pressure on women to uh meet these quite prescriptive beauty ideals. And now with you know the introducts but accessibility of tweakments and surgery, I feel like we're constantly being sold this myth that you can always be better, you can always be a little bit more perfected. And when we're in this state of always kind of becoming, trying to become this perfect version of ourselves, we're never able to just be in our bodies, be accepting of ourselves. Um, and so the first kind of bit of the book really explores how women are turned in on themselves, and it's such a brilliant distracting mechanism. So Naomi Wolf talks about how historically the kind of compelling women to basically just be in the domestic space and kind of the idol of domesticity was kind of what first kept women out of the public sphere. But as women became more present in the kind of public political economic sphere as we grew in our power there, the beauty industrial complex basically was the new way of getting us to be so distracted as to diminish some of our own power. And I see this so obviously now, and I think about it also myself. The hours I have spent hating my body, hating how I look, thinking, God, what could I have thought about or done in all that time that I spent at war with myself? But again, it's very kind of culturally ingrained in us to always be striving to look better and be more. And I reflect on the kind of toxicity of the naughties. Um so I grew up in, I was born in the early 90s, so I kind of really became I became a teenager in the noughties, which quite a few books being published now. Brilliant book called Um Dalongar by Sophie Gilbert amongst them, which reflect on just how brutal and toxic this period was. And it was a period of like, you know, tabloids would take pictures of women, so either women were too thin and emaciated, or they were too fat and be like mean red circles around cellulite. Women's bodies were kind of portrayed as these kind of carcasses to be held up and analyzed. It was also the era of the transformation where we saw, you know, we had reality TV shows, they were all about like there's one called The Swan, which was literally people would come and be put in this um this house and would go through numerous plastic surgeries and different kind of means of transformation and then shown themselves at the end, and then the winner would be the one who went from ugly duckling to most beautiful swan. I mean, it kind of even saying it, you're like, it's shocking. But it was so normalized. And so I think it's anyone who grew up in that period, and we're seeing, we still see, you know, elements of it seep into culture today. Again, it was about making the body, particularly women's bodies, these projects that you've constantly had to be laboring over that were never, never good enough and always needed to be, you know, time and money needed to be poured into making them better. So I think that would be one of the kind of cultural pillars that I think really separates women from their bodies. Because as I say, for as long as you see your body as something that needs that's that's never finished, it's always needing more work to become better. It's really hard to be, that's the antithesis to embodiment, to, you know, being able to be present in your body in a kind of, you know, central way. Um, so that's one of the kind of major things I look at. I also look at the kind of spate of sex myths that are so naturalized into our discourse around sex. Things like the virginity myth, this idea, you know, that you know, the prize that is a woman's virginity, because it's always a woman's virginity, we don't have this same kind of cultural obsession with men's so-called virginity. And how these sex myths become so normalized as and naturalized, so that we don't see that they are just kind of culturally rendered ideas that serve patriarchal ideology as a way of reinforcing the idea of a woman's sexuality as something that is always for a man, and its kind of psychedity is in a woman not being touched and in a woman being kind of so-called pure, which again politicizes our own connection to sex so profoundly and disconnects us from ourselves. And, you know, I talk about the way that these myths, like the virginity myth, as an example. I mean, you know, I remember growing up and, you know, having uh going to see like Brittany Spears' film Crossroads, and the whole film was basically about her deciding who to lose her virginity to. And it makes, leaves a mark on you because you think, oh, you know, this your virginity is this kind of prize, and you have to offer it out to a man because we still have a very heteronormative discourse discourse

Emma-Louise Boynton: 30:32

around sex. And, you know, what does it mean when you then become deflowered, you're less valuable? Again, it's putting all this cultural baggage on women's sexuality in a way that I think really problematizes our ability to just get to know our sexuality, get to know our bodies outside of this very heavy societal discourse. And so a lot of my own kind of process in this, personally, and I guess in the book it's taking that personal journey and then looking at it culturally, is around debunking these sex myths and analysing how they are instituted, how they are naturalized, and then how they show up in your own connection to sex and to sexuality. And I think, you know, a lot of the the kind of the way that we depict women's sexuality particularly is so much in service of men and this idea that women's bodies are there to bring pleasure to other people, but not to experience pleasure themselves. And I would say that was my own connection to sex for most of my life. I thought sex was something I did for other people, but not for myself. And I now, you know, it's been really interesting with the book going, going through so much material about like just unpacking, like, of course that was going to be your connection to sex because there were so many strands of the kind of media landscape, kind of cultural input that shaped your connection to sex that of course led you to believe that. I mean, even now, as you know, I mentioned Britney. Looking back on that film, even in that time, you know, we were obsessed with her virginity. There was a businessman who offered to pay, I think it was like seven million, which would in today's all have been 30 million for her virginity. Even, you know, looking back at that now, you kind of we were so obsessed with with these ideas and we allowed them to be reinforced and then impressed upon these um you know public figures. And obviously now we've seen the trajectory of Britney Spears and how she, you know, going into conservatorship, it kind of almost felt like this absolute perfect storm of her literally being owned by men, but just in different iterations. So a lot of that, yes, it's around kind of yeah, the the kind of the sex mythology that we have to unpack. I'm trying to think there's another one. It's amazing. Write a book, you spend so long with the material and you're so in the weeds of it, and someone asks you about it, and you're like, God, what earth did I write? Like, what is in the book? Um, but yeah, I would say those two are kind of some of the main ones. Oh, and sorry, and the final one I'll I'll just mention briefly, is when I when I kind of finished doing sex therapy, it was kind of it was it was I I thought being out of orgasm is like the beginning and the end. Obviously, it was like very much the beginning and set me on this journey of setting up sex talks and everything and making this kind of my life's work now of exploring this topic of sex. But one of the things I really had to grapple with, I think I've looked at the book and kind of like stepping back and seeing this on a more kind of societal level, is what does it mean to be a sexually liberated woman? What does it actually mean? Because I had grown up, I guess, with Wonderful Sex in the City, you know, discourse around the sexual liberation movement, all fantastic conversations, ones that very much led me to think that in order to be a sexually liberated woman, I needed to be able to fuck that consequence. I need to be able to have casual, meaningless sex because that's what it looked like to be free sexually. That was my very, again, it's like quite a singular model of sexual freedom that I think is, I don't want to say it's like the only model handed to us societally, but I think it has, you know, been reinforced. It's reinforced a lot in in shows like Sex and City, lots and the kind of, you know, things that followed. I don't think that's bad. I think it's fantastic for people to have that representation of sex. I think it's fantastic that women can, but I think the important thing is you have to able to choose your relationship to sex in your own terms. And this quite prescriptive idea of what it means to be sexually free, I think was like another layer of pressure I then put myself under to have sex in a carefree, disconnected way. Even when I felt like sexually healed, I was putting myself in situations I didn't really want to be in because I thought that was what I was meant to do as a sexually liberated woman. So there was also a kind of unpacking there that I then like look at in the book of like how do we expand our conversation around sexual liberation so as to be able to encompass everything that was learned and, you know, expanded on during the sexual liberation movement, but also update it so that it doesn't become this another pressure that women feel to perform sex in this disconnected way. And actually, I think that requires nuance in our broader conversation around sexuality that we don't quite have yet.

Ailey Jolie: 34:45

I would love to ask you why you feel like that nuance is specifically lacking. Because this is something that definitely I speak a lot about, or more historically in the past, around like how are we ensuring that we're not just taking the cultural script that's really put forward in patriarchal ideologies? Yes, having sexual freedom is amazing, and I wish it was a right that every human being had. And how do we ensure that it's actually just one option in which how we express our sexuality and not the only option we see? And how do we also hold that it being presented as the only option or the best option? How do we also hold that participation in that sometimes can also be participating in the disempowerment or the objectification or the perpetuation of the male gaze? And I think that nuance oftentimes gets lost because I get that it's sticky and it's a bit challenging. But I would just love to explore that a little bit with you. How you hold those like multitude of pieces? Because I know for myself, even exploring my own sexuality, how I've held that in myself, you know, and also with clients. It can be a really vulnerable, challenging conversation because there can be so much internalized shame and so much internalized judgment that's just kind of in the ethos, but it really doesn't need to be there.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 35:55

It's such an interesting question and it's such an important one because I think the thing I just keep coming back to recently is everything can be true at once. And I think that the by which I I guess by which I mean that much like you, I'm so grateful that feminists before us fought for our right to enjoy sex without consequence, that we had, you know, the birth control pill, that we had this movement that really advocated for female pleasure. I'm obsessed with Betty Dodson, who is this wonderful sex-positive feminist who I've uh discussed in the book and who made it her mission to teach a generation of women how to masturbate. Fantastic. For me, women like that, I stand on their shoulders as, you know, we're here able to have these conversations because of those women. I don't for a second wish any of that was different, but what I do think is that we often, I guess the way, I guess you know, part of the media, but pendulum swings. So you have this one quite, you know,

Emma-Louise Boynton: 36:45

previously very puritanical view of women's sexuality and it was very prescriptive, and then you had sexual liberation movement, which creates this new dialogue that then felt like, okay, we all now need to be sexually liberated, which means sex doesn't mean it have to mean anything to anyone. And I think now, particularly in an era of dating apps and I guess a more kind of casualization of romantic intimacy, which can be fantastic because it can be wonderful to get to explore all the different facets of your capacity for intimacy and sexuality without it needing to be anything deeper or bigger than that specific explosion. But with that, I think sometimes it then precludes us being able to acknowledge that for some people, like sex can actually be quite heavy. It can actually be something that means a lot. I really like to have sex for love. How uncool of me. It is so passe, but I do. And I think it's being able to, I I feel like right now it feels like it's very um uncool is such a like lame way of saying this, but it's like it feels like quite uncool to say that like you want to have meaningful sex, you want to be able like that sex for you is something that you don't want to have on a first date or something, like somehow being anti-feminist, and I don't think that's the case at all. I think that wherever I push up against prescriptive ideals around sexuality, so you need to have sex on the first date, you mustn't have sex on the first date, you need to wait till um date number three, you mustn't uh have sex until you meet the guy or girl or uh non-binary person, until this point. Any of these rules that I think we, especially in a social media driven age where they work really well, is little clickfait like videos or like slides of like, this is how to like succeed dating, this is how to that all of that for me is antithetical to a better, more nuanced conversation around sex. And I always say this to people at sex talks and every because this often comes up because I always get asked a question at sex talks. We do an anonymous Q ⁇ A at the very end. I love because people ask fantastically broad range of questions. I always get asked, there's a conversation around sex and dating, should you have sex in the first day, or can you have sex in the first day, or should you wait? And to me, even the fact that that question comes up so much, people feel like, okay, I there's got to be a body of rules that I abide by because if I'm not doing that, I'm doing it wrong. And my response to that always is it depends what you want out of the situation. It depends where your head is at, it depends where your body is at. There is no set of rules that you can neatly follow that are going to like work because everyone and everybody is different. The reason you have sex is gonna be different for the reason I have sex. And the reason I have sex is gonna be different today than it is in one month's time, you know, in a relationship outside of a relationship. So I think I guess so it's a little bit of a kind of convoluted answer. Nuance doesn't fit that well in our clickbait culture because clickbait is very essentialist and very prescriptive because it needs to be. It needs to be simple, repeatable, and hopefully viral. And actually, nuance requires that sticky area that says there aren't any rules, and actually, you need to kind of do the work to understand what your boundaries are in this context. You need to understand kind of what you want from sex and define that in a way that feels comfortable. And a lot of that is around exploration. So I am I write about this book and when I grappled this question of sexual liberation. I went out after sex therapy and was like, cool, I just need to have sex. And it's kind of, you know, I started dating a sex addict and we just had loads of casual, meaningless sex. Because I was like, this is what it is about. And I felt terrible. I really it didn't cater to my emotional needs or my physical needs, really. I need a feeling of safety and connection and consistency, and that was lacking it. But I only figured that out by being pushed up against that boundary through that period of sexual exploration, which to me highlights so perfectly. I'm so grateful to live in an environment which I can, as a woman, have that freedom, have that capacity to explore, to kind of push up against my own boundaries in a way that feels uncomfortable, so that I get that it's a boundary. But then I also want to be able to have the, you know, self-awareness and the self-confidence to be like, okay, that doesn't work for me. I actually need to have sex in this way. I need to have sex as more main like traditional way of like it really meaning someone. I wanted that person to be in love with me. Hard to come by when you're single. I've only recently gone to relationship where I'm like, okay, now this is this is it. And then you wrote a book and it fucks your sex life quite profoundly. So, yeah, so I think, sorry, I feel it's a really hard question to answer concisely because I don't think there is a there's a concise answer. I think it's about constantly critiquing. This is Kate Moyle says this actually really brilliantly. She's a fantastic sex therapist, and she says we need to constantly be questioning our shoulds. Anytime you're

Emma-Louise Boynton: 41:06

saying, you know, I should have sex in the first day, I should feel like this, I should be more wet, I should, should, should, where is this should coming from? Because more often than not, you can locate that should to some part of the, you know, cultural sexual script that you learned but don't necessarily believe. And I think, you know, Emily Lagoski's garden of sexuality metaphor to me is kind of the gold standard here because she talks about how, you know, from the moment we're born, we get given this garden of our sexuality and it is populated with other people's, you know, over time, other people plant their weeds, their, you know, poison ivy, and it's all these other people's ideas around sex, shame, gender ideals, whatever. And at a certain point, if you're lucky, you get that you suddenly look at your garden because you have that capacity for self-reflection in terms of your connection to sex, you say, hang on a second, this garden does not reflect my belief system. And then you get to de-weeding. You pull out the negative ideas that don't correspond to your value system when it comes to your body and to sex, and then you plant better ones. So, as frustrating as this process can be, it's also a process of liberation. And it is, you know, a process to be, you know, enjoyed and celebrated. And I think for me, this whole process of going through sex therapy, of writing this book, of kind of setting up running sex talks, has been a process of de-weeding my garden and then planting much better ideas around sexuality and my body. But I do not believe I'm done. The garden is constantly, you know, weeds are always falling in. And that there's those those shuts, you know, there's those prescriptive ideas. So it's about constantly being critical about your own baked-in belief system and just questioning, like, oh, do I really believe that? Or have I been conditioned to believe that? And then just being, I guess, a bit more rigorous with that.

Ailey Jolie: 42:40

Because you mentioned sex talks, I would love to end our time together by asking you if maybe there was a moment or question. We've had vast experience, but in all of hosting sex talks, that really stands out to you that you wish you could microphone or highlight because you really wish other people had maybe been there to hear that question or experience that moment with you.

Emma-Louise Boynton: 43:01

I love this question, and I've never been asked it before. I have had so many incredible conversations with amazing people and amazing experts and the best of the best, and I feel so privileged. But the moment that stands out for me as soon as you ask that question, that comes immediately into my body, into my mind, is not from someone, an expert. It was from uh a woman who came up to me at the end of sex talks, and she'd come to quite a few of them, and she said, These talks have been so transformative for me. I'm in my second coming. And I was like, tell me more, tell me about your second coming. She was like, I recently, she'd recently broken up with her partner. It had been, I think, an abusive relationship, an unhappy relationship, been problematic, not a sex-positive relationship. And finally she'd ended that relationship, and she was in this space of exploration, of curiosity, and she was coming home to her body, and she was like, I'm in my second coming, and coming to these talks and having these conversations around sex and intimacy. So this is so much a part of that journey. She's like, I feel and she was, I think she's in her 40s, like late 40s. And for me, I've had many iterations of. That conversation. And that that I was initially actually going to call the book the second coming, but unfortunately someone else got there first. But that term, the second coming, came up like sex, like three times consecutively in the space of about two weeks, with women telling me, I'm going through this massive shift. And it's around my connection to sexuality. And these women aren't like, you know, they're, you know, women who are in their 40s and their 50s. And for me, that just sums up why this work is so important, that the work that you're doing, the work, you know, that sex talks set out to do, just all of the having better conversations around sex, it turns your life from black and white to technicolor when you're able to connect to your body and to your sexuality in a joyful, pleasureful way. And so when I hear women at love at different stages of their life say how different they feel now that they've, you know, reckoned with their problematic sex with, where they've emptied their garden of damaging sex myths, and they're now on this wonderful, pleasure-filled journey to rediscovering themselves, that just makes me burst with joy. And I think it also just showcases how many of us are affected by the negative sexual script that we inherit, but how possible it is to upturn that script and to recalibrate your relationship to sex in your body. And what a privilege to get to do so.

Ailey Jolie: 45:09

Thank you so much for that, but also for your time. I know you have an upcoming book. Is there anything about the book that you would like to share with the listener?

Emma-Louise Boynton: 45:15

Oh my gosh. It's so often so in the weeds about it. I can't even remember my own name at this point. I'm like, am I writing a book? I I think so. I'm Richard Bad to go back into edits. It's called Pleasure, The Reclamation of My Body. It is out in May. And it sounds really cliched to say it's a book I wish I had, but it is. It tells a story of my own, yeah, reclamation of my body and my own discovery of pleasure and mirroring that trajectory against the kind of cultural backdrop that in many ways shaped that whole process and from a negative perspective and a positive perspective, and all the incredible people I've met along the way. So it is jam-packed full of incredible storytelling, I would like to say, and learnings from what has been the most transformative few years of my life. And it feels to me like the beginning of something. I think it's the first book of many because I feel like I'm on the beginning of this incredible sexual odyssey of sorts. So anyone who is curious about deepening their connection to their body, who wants more pleasure in their life, who loves a bit of feminist critical theory to help them make sense of the world around them, this book is for you.

Ailey Jolie: 46:21

Before we end this episode, I want to stay with something for just a moment longer. Emma Louise said she was so disconnected from her body, and she said that she thought that this was fine at the time. Her words in this episode were, Who needs a body? We live online anyways. And at this point, she hadn't had an orgasm in five or six years. She said to herself she just wasn't a sexual person. She just kind of accepted that that's who she was. And then her sex therapist said, For as long as you're at war with your body, you're gonna struggle to enjoy pleasure. And I really felt those words land somewhere deep when she said, and I really felt her words in her experience land really deep inside my own body. And that may be because I've had the privilege of being the therapist in the room who offers those words, but it's also because I've had the privilege of being the client who receives those words from the therapist too. I know the feeling and the pain and the sensations and the struggle that comes with being at war in your body. I've lived it. And I sit with people every week who are in it too. People who are so far outside themselves that they don't even know they've left and they don't even know they could come home too. Here's what I really want you to hear from this episode today. And there are words that Emma Louise said to us, words from her therapist. You can't be at war with your body and available for pleasure at the same time. I know that there are parts of you that probably wish that wasn't true or don't believe it even, but the reality is that they don't coexist. One is standing outside yourself when you're watching, assessing, measuring, monitoring, comparing your body, and feeling pleasure really requires you to be inside your body, doing exactly that. So I hope in listening to this episode, you don't feel like there's something new you have to learn, or some skill, or some tools you have to go pick up. This is really all about laying things down, softening. It's about letting yourself do the tender, vulnerable act of really feeling your body and really being present in this moment. A moment that I want to really pull out from all of my time with Emma Louise that we shared is the moment that she said right at the end, because I think it's really important to highlight this specifically. Emma Louise shared at one of her events, a woman came up to her and said, I'm in my second coming. She was in her late 40s and she was finally landing in her body for the first time. And I wanted to pull this moment out of the episode because it highlights the truth, the reality that we can start the process of coming home to our body right now, at any age, it's never too late. So wherever you are, the question I have for you is can you feel your breath? Not to change it, just feel it. Can you feel your hands? Can you feel your chest rising and falling? That is all you. This is your one home. If you want support with this, my in-body course is for the slow, brave work of coming home to your body. And my subsec is where I write about this process. You can either join and paid or free. I'd love to have you there. Again, thank you for listening and thank you for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Alia Sholie, to be a part of that process with you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.