You’d Be Surprised How Many Sexual and Reproductive Health Issues Are Included in Bridgerton

It's just so time-consuming and you , I feel like you never catch everything, but there's just so many various things that have to keep track of. So it has been kind of sucking up my life right now, but we're almost done. It should hopefully be coming out very, very soon. So that's exciting. It's always nice to get big projects out into the world. So I will be happy when that is done. Also bringing me joy this week.

As I ordered a ton of girl scout cookies, I saw a link going around online for a troop in New York city. That is , um , an homed. So I made sure to buy a ton from them and send some to friends. And I am enjoying having girl scout cookies. It's just very bringing me joy right now. Just it's the little things and let's see what else exciting is happening. I haven't done any really exciting baking. I made muffins this past weekends , cherry almond oatmeal, and they were delightful.

Nothing like challenging. I think I'm going to try to make croissants again. So when I made the panel chocolate last time I did a couple that were savory. So I think this time I'm going to make, make more savory, maybe like some ham and cheese and maybe some cheese. So they have them for lunch over the course of that next week and have some, maybe chocolate ones or maybe some almond filled ones. Cause those are my favorite as well as the almond filled one . So we'll see about that.

Maybe I can do that too. So that is my big plans. So like I said, nothing too exciting, you know, as we're approaching a year of being at home with the pandemic, I feel like everything is so routine now. There's nothing like new and exciting happening, but that's okay. But one of the things I did so last week , uh, our last episode, I told you all that about book recommendations and that I'm a big reader and that you could find me on good reads if you were interested.

But I've also started a , um, a book and bakes related Instagram. So my, my personal Instagram is private. So you can't follow me there, but this one will have, if you want to keep up on what I'm reading or what I'm baking also includes pictures of the cat . Sometimes you can follow me at all books and bred on Instagram and it's public. So y'all are welcome to connect with me. If you want to learn more about what I'm reading and faking .

And like I said, special guests appearances from the kitties every once in a while . And with that, we are going to turn to this week's episode. I hope everybody did their homework and watched bridge written because this is the very special bridge written episode. So I know this obviously goes without saying, but spoiler alert for the rest of the episode, make sure if you don't want, if you haven't watched bridge and you don't want to know what happened, turn away.

Now we are going to be talking about sexual and reproductive health and written , and there's a lot to talk about. So I'm very excited to have with me, Laura, Linberg at the cutie mocker Institute to join us and talk to us all about Burton and SRHR issues that we saw pop up. So from here on out spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

And that also struck me as well, seeing the black woman died and the white women did not, which kind of mirrors reality right now,

So I'm not sure how to think about that, but I was very struck at the tension, the emotional weight that young woman must've carried of having a child is the absolutely necessary social role for them. And yet it comes with this real risk. So you're damned if you do, and possibly damned if you don't or the other way around, you're definitely damned if you don't and you're possibly damned if you do, and entering into adult womanhood with F fear seems like a real weight for these young women. Yeah.

And in so many ways, I mean, one of the things that struck me about the gender roles is the very strong sexual double standard where women have to be pristine and virtuous and innocent and not have sex before marriage. Whereas the men are not just expected, but really encouraged to go out and wet . Their WIC is Anthony said, which I think is a disgusting phrase, but there's this whole scene where he is upset with Collin. And he's like, I should have taken you out to get sex.

So you wouldn't be rushing to get married now because men should wait. But for women early marriage is a way to protect virginity. And we know this historically, and we know this even now in the world that in settings and cultures, in which virginity is highly valued, it's important to marry girls off early. So that virginity is still in place. That's really constraining .

And then, you know, another thing on the gender roles, I thought, I mean, from my position now, I, my heart was just breaking for Daphne's mom. Oh yeah, for sure. Right. So her husband dies and now her son is in charge of her whole life . And he's the head of the household in a real way, not just to sit at the head of the table, the dining room kind of way. And having that control of her life just felt heartbreaking from today's vision point. Yeah .

You know, another place where you kind of saw this was okay, so gender roles, but then there was also the social dynamics and looking at, you know, the class in the way it showed up in Burton .

And the idea that they're seen involved in this seems completely new and eye opening to Daphne. And she runs to her personal lady's maid and says, tell me how babies are made. All the details. Don't be shy. I need to hear this. But underlying that is her complete expectation that her lady's maid , because she was lower class would of course know all the details, why or she doesn't .

So there's just this expectation that depending on your place in the social strata, what information you have access to, I thought was very strong. The other place I really noticed social class was with the offer center. So my son is an opera singer and I was very struck by what was common during that period. And really perhaps, even up to now with the idea that people in the arts are low morals, more sexual. Now, you don't become an opera singer because you have low morals.

You become an opera singer because you have talents yet. Once you were in that role, in that time period, apparently sex for money, whether directly paid for the act or more of a mistress kind of role is one way to help support yourself. So the opera singer who was having the affair with Anthony could do that because of her social class position and was encouraged to do that at the gentleman's club. For example. Yeah.

Yes. So just being a British working woman, wouldn't be enough, wouldn't be adequate, but being French adds a level of panache to that. Yes.

So I think with Marina, the self managed abortion is coming from desperation and she faces a lot of risk for it. Whereas motivations for self-managed abortion now in the U S I think are more mixed. There's a study by Abigail akin from , um , university of Texas found that self-managed abortion increased during COVID, which is an increase disproportionately in places where access was more, less had become more limited.

So that's ordering pills through the mail, which was how they , most self-managed abortion was going on. But what she was studying was ordering pills through the mail that mail delivery offered a means to access abortion when you couldn't get to the clinic, either because the clinic was closed or you were concerned about COVID or something like that.

So access is certainly one piece in the U S but I think autonomy is also playing a role now that women want to be in charge of their own bodies and charge of their own. Decision-making not having these laws and healthcare structures telling them how and what they can and cannot do. And when used properly medication, abortion, self-managed abortion in the U S is not dangerous, certainly not in the way it would have been a Marina. Yeah.

And if it feels heartbreaking, I think through today's lens, I mean, it was certainly heartbreaking for them, but heartbreaking through today's lens in part for me, because Daphne appears to have this close relationship with her mother I'm in the bridge or shins are held up as the picture perfect family, where everyone cares about each other and cares for each other. And yet her mother .

So let her down in this area because of her own discomfort and Daphne in the end becomes very angry at her mother for sending her out into the world without the information she needed. And I think she was right to be, I mean, for her mother to have that conversation, to try to have that conversation before her wedding and 99.9% of any information out of that.

But the idea that she should learn about sexual pleasure, because it will make everything else better down the road was wonderful to share that piece of information. And in fact, she does so good for her. So, you know, two thumbs up or whatever thing do you need to use for the sexual pleasure. I think that's great here. So again, big spoiler. We hope you all know this, but Duke relies on withdrawal to not get her pregnant. He doesn't want her to get pregnant.

He tells her he can't have a baby, which she assumes means that he physiologically is unable and capable. And instead is that he doesn't want to. And he uses for all to do this. I think he's assuming that she doesn't understand what the withdrawal is doing, but I guess it remains an open question. If he thinks she understood that. I'm not sure. I , again, I watched with my mother, she didn't understand it. She certainly knows what withdrawal is, but she found this .

She didn't understand the scenes, what he was doing, but I think he's counting on her lack of knowledge to get away with this for as long as he can. And then she goes to her mate and figures out that when he's doing that, it's keeping her from getting pregnant.

I mean, there is the scene where she says like, doesn't that hurt when she has an orgasm and a Jackie lights and he, you know, shores or no laughs at that again, more of the positive, rigid an idea around sexual pleasure, but she can't consent to what he's doing because she doesn't understand it.

And I think this helps us think about what good sex ed needs to include. We want sex ed that teaches about consent and we want sex ed that also encourages the development of communication skills, whether in an intimate relationship or even skills about communication and consent that can carry over to other parts of people's lives.

We may see Shonda Rhimes daughter making a show about today's young people and abstinence only instruction and a lack of access to contraception in my own research. So I count things for a living. Um, and mostly I count things around sexual reproductive health. So what are the things that I study are trends in who receives sex education and what's taught in schools and I've been doing this for a long time. So there's been no expansion.

And how many teens receive formal sex ed in 25 years in the us that

What they're not getting is information about using birth control, where to get birth control, how to use it correctly and properly. And that leaves young people really without the skills and information they need today, just in the same way that Daphne didn't have the skills and information she needs and our society right now, at least among adults still has a discomfort around young people's sex and sexuality that keeps them from providing information.

I think in the same way that we saw with Daphne's mother it's adults discomfort.

And if there was, it was, it doesn't work, you know, good old Catholic church teaching really great things that really took a long time to unlearn. And you know, some of that shame and stigma is really hard to share

Yeah. It's not information neutral. And kids pick that up and know that they didn't have these conversations and realize it must be because about being uncomfortable and being it being shameful and it being stigmatized and then carry that forward. You know, while I think our schools can be doing a much better job, I think there's no, there's no one single actor who is responsible for this. There's no single solution. We need an ecosystem of sex, education and information.

That's provided by schools, by parents, by healthcare providers. And they need to be working together and not passing the buck to the other person. I don't need to do it at home because the school is going to do it. The doctor's saying, this says, this really isn't my thing. I'm going to let the parent do it wrong. Everyone needs to be stepping up to give kids information, to give people the young information they need.

And I think part of that stepping up, isn't just about individual discomfort or that you can address individual discomfort by building and systems that support and train the adults in these roles. So we can have policies that support good sex ed on the books, but there is trust this slippery slope of not following the policies as you go from the state policy that the school district to the school, to the classroom on a particular day and in the end, it's what that teacher does in the classroom.

On the particular day, that's going to matter. And some teachers are going to teach about contraception. Even if the school says it's not supposed to happen because they think it's important. And some teachers aren't going to teach about it because it makes them uncomfortable or they don't value it. And that's a problem when one of my sons took middle school, health education, which was supposed to include a sex ed component. He missed out on a lot. So here's what happened.

I live in New Jersey, which has a fairly progressive set of state policies around sex education, which include teaching about contraception. So my son should have gotten contraception instruction and his , his health education class. Well, the teacher came up with the curriculum that would send a teach contraception and a single lesson, pushed it to the end of the semester and called in sick that day.

My son learned a lot about whole wheat bread and his middle school health education class, and nothing about contraception, but that's not what the law says. That's what the reality was in the classroom. So we need teacher training that supports teachers in getting the information they need and being comfortable with doing this and the same way we need to be holding healthcare providers, accounts, countable , and giving them the training they need.

You would think doctors should be fine with this, but they're not. And that is really a missed opportunity for bringing another educated , educated, and caring adult into young people's lives to support them in getting information and asking hard questions.

If you don't understand what you're agreeing to, how can you do it? How would you know, if you were treated poorly, if you didn't have the expectation that this should be something that you would enjoy. And when we don't hold up, particularly for young women that their pleasure counts, then they put themselves in a situation we're being treated poorly by a partner is just considered the norm.

I doubt it. So you may have a whole cohort who misses that class and misses that information. And yet this is such a missed opportunity for schools, because in fact, there's some wonderful online resources that have been developed to teach sex education such as the amaze videos. Those are great. Yeah. And they could and should be incorporated into online learning. I mean, this is an opportunity to pivot and expand how instruction is happening. Not just walk away from it.

But I think realistically schools are so overwhelmed that just isn't happening much. But the other thing is that young people certainly know how to go on the internet and look up information. However, you can't search for answers to questions you don't even know to ask. So imagine if Daphne had had an iPhone, what would she have started looking up before she married the Duke? She doesn't know what the questions are.

So I don't think that online resources are the simple answer for getting young people's sex education information. They can't do it alone there, but it can be a resource.

It's not one conversation. So hold yourself accountable for talking to your kid. As they age about developmentally appropriate topics and making yourself an adult they can trust with that, hold their doctors accountable. And in particular, when I want to hold up here is leaving your teen with time alone with their healthcare provider. That time alone is critical to them.

Being able to ask questions about things that makes them uncomfortable, if they want to know more about, and maybe don't want you to be included in that. And we know from a lot of national data that far too often, don't get that time along with their health care provider. And then finally school systems aren't opportunity to advocate. I mean, it's, in some ways, it's good that decisions about sex ed are getting implemented in your local community.

So your local school board, your local principal, your kid's classroom teacher has the ability to make their sex ed better and hold them accountable for that.

If you don't have a young person at home, you can still be advocating for better policies around sex education, whether at the federal or state level, and even in your own town, the voices need to speak up that comprehensive sex education would provide medically accurate information is a human right for our young people and need to drown out what are actually relatively few voices who are against this.

When we poll people about sex education, no matter their political party, they support sex education for young people, the majority. So we need to make that majority voice loud and strong. Well, Laura, thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful to get to talk to you. It was really fun to talk to you and we'll have to keep waiting for season two. I know in the time I'm seriously bingeing an Australian show called offspring, just completely different, but has lots of sexual pleasure.

And I highly recommend, Oh, I'll have to check it out. Yes . Well, thank you. Thank you, Jenny. Okay. Everybody. I hope you enjoyed our conversation about Bridger 10. If he likes it, maybe we'll do something like this again. I'm sure there are plenty of other shows that have sexual and reproductive health issues that we should talk about. So if you have ones that you would love to see us, bring somebody on and talk about, let me know.

Um, you can always reach out to me on social media at reprots fight back on Facebook and Twitter and reprots SB on Instagram, and we will make sure to cover those shows.