Sexing History Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

In this episode, we’ll be taking a cue from Santa Claus and sketching a naughty and nice history of festive sexual expressions. So, grab your eggnog, curl up by the fire and join us as we explore the ghosts of Christmas nights past.

Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman
Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui
Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis
Assistant Producers: Stephen Colbrook and Mallory Szymanski
Research Associates: Caroline Azdell, Katie Kenny and Felix Yeung.
To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

How do you come out in a religious community that loves you conditionally? What do you tell yourself about your faith and your desires when your Church views your sexuality as disordered? In this episode of Sexing History, we focus on the experiences of three gay men who were priests or seminarians in the St. Louis diocese beginning in the 1990s. Their overlapping stories, their friendships, their faith, and the ways in which they came out to themselves and each other within Catholic institutions, speak to the intertwined histories of desire and devotion.
Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman

Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui

Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis

Assistant Producers: Stephen Colbrook and Mallory Szymanski

Research Associates: Katie Kenny and Felix Yeung.

Interns: Hugh MacNeil, Ian McCabe and Emily Vaughn.

Thank you to Brian McNaught, Gary Meier, Phil Tiemeyer, and Jeff Vomund for sharing their stories with us.

To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media.

Straight white men’s sexuality is too often imagined as natural, timeless, and unchanging. In The Pickup Artist, we showcase the 1970 bestseller, How to Pick Up Girls, in order to explore the cultural forces that have shaped how white men experienced and publicly expressed their desire for women in increasingly casual and aggressive ways.

How to Pick Up Girls by Eric Weber was a mass-marketed book that advised men on how to introduce themselves to and seduce women. The book spawned several sequels and countless imitators. But more importantly, How to Pick Up Girls represented the triumph of a male-dominated sexual revolution that allowed men to demand ever-greater access to any woman’s time, body, and attention.

Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman

Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui

Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis

Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski
Interns: Katie Kenny, Hugh MacNeil, Ian McCabe, Emily Vaughn and Felix Yeung. Julia Zaksek provided research assistance on this episode.

To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media. 

The story of African American midwifery is part of a larger history of Black women’s struggles to protect their own lives, as well as the lives of other Black women and their children. This episode explores the long history of African American midwives, doulas, and birth attendants who have labored to ensure the safety and dignity of Black mothers and their children in and beyond the maternity ward. These women have worked to provide emotional support and medical advocacy for other pregnant and laboring African American women. Their reproductive advocacy makes clear that the delivery room has become an important site to ensure that Black lives matter.

Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman

Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui

Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis

Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski

To learn more about our podcast, please visit us at www.sexinghistory.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes and share us on social media. 

Welcome to a bonus track from Sexing History. This track features an extended version of Gillian Frank’s interview with Marabel Morgan from our episode “Touch Me, I’m Yours.” That episode explores how Evangelical women responded to and contributed to the sexualization of American culture in the 1970s.

In 1973, Marabel Morgan’s marriage guide, The Total Woman, became a bestseller and a cultural sensation. Millions of people read The Total Woman and thousands signed up for her classes. These classes offered marital advice and included sexual assignments for wives such as asking them to dress up in sexy lingerie, exotic costumes and “to be prepared for sexual intercourse every night for a week.”

Historians and cultural commentators frequently refer to Marabel Morgan’s ideas and to her influence. Although she was a fixture on television during the 1970s, recorded interviews with Marabel Morgan are nearly impossible to find. We are therefore delighted to share this extended interview with Marabel Morgan in which she shares her memories about her childhood, her marriage, the changing meaning of her faith, and how writing The Total Woman changed her life.

Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman

Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui

Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis

Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski

If you enjoyed this bonus track, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media. 

Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History. 

In the 1960s and early 1970s many Americans believed that rape was a rare and violent act perpetrated by outsiders and sociopaths. Popular culture taught men that women needed to be tricked or coerced into sex, and psychiatrists accused rape victims of secretly inviting their attacks. Susan Brownmiller’s best-selling book Against Our Will shattered these myths about sexual violence. Informed by the broader feminist anti-rape movement, Against Our Will portrayed rape as a systemic, pervasive, and culturally sanctioned act of power and intimidation.
Yet even as Brownmiller provided a framework for naming sexual violence as a mechanism of patriarchy, she also minimized the importance of race and denied the ways that rape accusations have long justified the criminalization and murder of men of color. At a moment when #MeToo has brought about yet another national reckoning with sexual violence and male power, Brownmiller’s book, its legacy, and the contexts that produced the anti-rape movement of the 1970s demand re-examination.
Hosts and Creators: Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman
Senior Producer: Saniya Lee Ghanoui
Producer and Story Editor: Rebecca Davis
Assistant Producers: Chris Babits, Isabel Machado and Mallory Szymanski
Intern: Julian Harbaugh
Thank you to Susan Brownmiller for sharing her story with us.
If you enjoyed this episode, please review us on iTunes or Soundcloud and share us on social media.
Please support our work and keep new episodes coming by making a small donation to Sexing History.