What Excites Us!

Transcript:

Ep 50 - Folklore & Sex Ed with Jeanna Jorgensen

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[00:00:00] Gwyn: This podcast is about sex and sexuality, so please only listen if you are an adult without kids or other ears around that cannot or do not consent to sensitive language and content. Thanks.

[00:00:27] Jeanna Jorgensen: the refrain of the newspapers became, you know, well, if it's too vile to mail, it's too vile to teach. So

[00:00:39] Gwyn: Hello and welcome to What Excites Us, the podcast that discusses sex and sexuality from a variety of perspectives. My name is Gwyn Isaacs. I am a certified sex coach who has professionally been helping people feel better about their sexuality and how to approach it with glee since 2017. In this episode, I'm chatting with folklorist Jeanna Jorgensen.

[00:01:07] If you, like most people, don't understand what folklore has to do with sex, you are in for a pleasantly surprising conversation. Jeanna Jorgensen earned her Ph. D. in Folklore and Gender Studies from Indiana University, and she has since taught at UC Berkeley and a variety of universities around the Midwest.

[00:01:28] She has published over 25 academic articles and book chapters on various facets of gender and sexuality in folklore, literature, and pop culture. And her current research alternates between the study of ethical non monogamies and the history of sex education.

[00:01:47] The first time I listened back to this chat, I was disappointed that I didn't ask more questions about her latest book, Sex Education 101, Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, and History. Since I had recently finished reading it, I found it thoroughly engaging and educational. Between then and now, I've realized it's okay because it is such a great book, and if we had talked more about it, you might not be inclined to go buy it and read it, which I highly encourage you to do.

[00:02:21] You can do that at her website, folklore101. com, or wherever you already buy your electronic books.

[00:02:30] Just a real quick note that Jeanna Jorgensen just produced her book on paperback. So you can get that wherever fine books are sold.

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[00:02:41] Welcome Jeanna Jorgensen to What Excites Us. I'm super excited to have this conversation. I, at one point, dipped my toes into the study of folklore and decided it wAs a little too scientific, actually scientific for me. I'm more of a flighty artist type. But I still love it. It's fascinating stuff. And especially the modern, urban folklore stuff. So this is going to be really, really interesting.

[00:03:10] Jeanna Jorgensen: Awesome. Thanks for having me. And yeah, we welcome everyone to the study of folklore. So if you want to revisit, you are more than welcome to do so.

[00:03:19] Gwyn: Awesome. Thank you. So you just came out with a new book. Tell us about your book.

[00:03:23] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. My book is Sex Education 101 Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, and History. I named it that, not because it's a how to of sex education, but because it's more of a why, and because I already have a 101 series of books starting with Folklore 101, where I'm like, Hey, I have a PhD in this stuff. I want to bring it to the masses and help everybody understand. What is cool and interesting and relevant about folklore, fairy tales, the history of sex ed, and more.

[00:03:54] Gwyn: Yeah, it's fascinating. As I mentioned before I officially hit record I've started it. I'm about, I don't know, a little less than halfway through it. And a lot of the information I know being a sex geek, but the take on it is really fascinating. And, I love seeing the way that we incorporate these beliefs without even realizing that it's a cultural folklore, basically.

[00:04:20] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, for sure. One of the reasons I love studying folklore is that we all have it, even if we don't think of it that way. So I define folklore as informally transmitted traditional culture. So we're all a part of culture, multiple cultures, overlapping cultures. So we all have our own folklore, whether it's slang or beliefs or stereotypes or jokes that we tell or stories that we tell. So we all participate in this daily, multiple times a day without necessarily registering that it's part of something bigger. So I like to help people learn about that.

[00:04:55] Gwyn: Yeah. The parsing out of it is really fascinating. Like I want to learn more about what happens on bathroom walls all of a sudden.

[00:05:06] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. Latrinellia is pretty, pretty interesting, pretty cool. And it goes back to the ancient Romans. Like people have been leaving graffiti in public restroom walls for millennia as a way of, you know, like, obviously like your mom jokes figure pretty prominently in those, but it also says something about us, like what we think is taboo, what we think is funny.

[00:05:25] Gwyn: Yeah. Your mom, it never even crossed my mind that, but of course your mom jokes are going to go back as long as humans exist. So how far back do we have evidence of the writing of these? You said Roman times?

[00:05:40] Jeanna Jorgensen: I want to say Roman times. Yeah, I'd have to go back and double check that citation. But you know, if a culture has a writing system, they probably use that writing in somewhat inappropriate ways at times. So

[00:05:52] Gwyn: I love that so much! So good. That's so good. How else do we see culture infiltrating our lives without being aware of it?

[00:06:05] Jeanna Jorgensen: I think one really good one is the example of folk medicine. So this idea that like, you know, official medicine is you go to your doctor and they give you a prescription and you go to the pharmacy and you take the thing and hopefully you feel better. But folk medicine is not a part of those institutions.

[00:06:21] Folk medicine is something that is passed down from your family or from your social groups or from the healer in your community. And so I will frequently ask my college students when we're doing a unit on this, what do you remember your mom doing when you felt sick when you were a kid? And It would often be like, if I had an upset stomach, it was 7up or ginger ale. If I had a cold, it was chicken noodle soup. And again, none of these things come with a prescription label on them. So it's just the accumulated wisdom of a community over the years saying, Yeah, we think that works.

[00:06:53] Gwyn: Yeah. Yeah, that's so fascinating. And yeah, it just gets passed down through generations. So how does that show up today in our sexuality? In specific, in Western culture, United States based culture?

[00:07:09] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. And so, so many ways. I think that sometimes folklore is very concrete and easy to point out and define like, Oh, that's an urban legend. The man with the hook for a hand or alligators in the sewers of New York. Sometimes it's really easy to describe. It's very concrete. Other times it's sort of amorphous.

[00:07:28] So a lot of the times, like beliefs, attitudes, stereotypes. We would say those are part of folklore because they're not like written in the HR handbook. They're not a part of institutional culture necessarily. So I think we still have so many folk ideas and attitudes and stereotypes around sexuality, like what's right and what's normal.

[00:07:51] So, one example of this is I learned some interesting slang from my college students, including the term body count. Which again, like it's slang, it's folklore. You're not going to find it in a dictionary. It's an informal usage of the word. So body count refers to how many people you slept with.

[00:08:07] And so again, the fact that the saying exists, that's folklore. The fact that people use it to talk about, judgment and value and worth like, oh, well, if you're a girl and your body count is high. Like you're a slut, you're not a good person, you're not a good partner, you're not a good catch or whatever, you're not wife material so I think we still have a lot of these implicit attitudes that circulate through folklore and as folklore that dictates how we approach gender roles and being sexually active and stuff like that.

[00:08:35] Gwyn: Yeah, that's, so fascinating and how it morphs over time and shifts, the language, but also the ideas

[00:08:43] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, yeah. And I think again, like folklore is always a part of this conversation, even when it's not necessarily named as such. For instance, I'm teaching a class this semester. I teach at Butler University and here in Indianapolis. And the class is titled Women, Gender and Folklore. It's an upper division anthropology elective.

[00:09:01] And we read this article that I really love. It's written by some sociologists. It doesn't mention folklore at all. But this handful of sociologists, they spent a year living in a college women's dormitory. To study just, you know, their attitudes, their perceptions, their experiences. And so they wrote this article about slut shaming.

[00:09:18] How the word slut, when weaponized against other girls, doesn't technically necessarily mean how many sexual partners you have. The girls who were lower status, lower income would use it against the richer girls to basically be like, they're not nice. They're not playing by our social rules. And the richer, higher status girls would wheel it against the lower social status girls to say that they were trashy.

[00:09:41] And so like the word almost becomes empty, but it's still slang. It's still folklore. It's just taking on these different dimensions that are more about social class than sexual activity. And I love that article to pieces and I teach it whenever I can, but it doesn't explicitly mention folklore, even though it's about folklore. So go figure.

[00:09:58] Gwyn: is fascinating and again, it's something that we're just inundated with and surrounded by, and we never even think about it. Right. of course, that's the way you use slut. Like you use the word bitch or cunt or whatever, like just some lady that you don't like,

[00:10:17] Jeanna Jorgensen: yeah.

[00:10:18] Gwyn: and yet it's never crossed my mind. It's just sort of the way it is.

[00:10:22] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah.

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[00:12:13] Fascinating, fascinating stuff. I'm just about to get to the chapter on the Comstock laws. So it seems to me that you're alluding to, and like I said, I haven't read the chapter yet, but that you're alluding to sometimes there is an actual place that we can pinpoint how we got these beliefs.

[00:12:33] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yes, yeah. And this is part of why I want to tell everybody to read my book, not just like I worked on this thing for a better chunk of a year. And so like, I want everyone to read it. I want you to see what I did. But also because we are repeating history in ways that are so bizarre and so intense.

[00:12:48] All of the book banning laws that are circulating right now in 2022, 2023. That's a direct link back to Comstock, even if people don't realize it. For those who don't know, Anthony Comstock was a dude who fought in the civil war on the side of the union, moved to New York, became a drag goods clerk, was very Christian married eventually.

[00:13:08] And he just got super obsessed with this idea. And he started running with politicians and stuff that vice and immoral things you know, this is the 1870s things like little pornographic books or toys, or even contraceptive devices that these things were contributing to the crumbling morality of society. They were corrupting youthful, innocent children. They were basically all that was wrong with the world. And at the time he was working with bizarrely the YMCA. They had a branch in New York to like fight vice.

[00:13:44] And Comstock became enough of a big deal with his whole like vice crusader thing to get the attention of people in Congress who passed the first federal Comstock law in either 1872 or 1873, but there were state laws as well. New York had a state law where basically you could go arrest someone on the basis of them having these, you know, dirty things. And the U S postal service was complicit in this.

[00:14:09] So you could not mail. Things like, hello, you have a uterus. Here's how to not conceive like books and pamphlets without risking getting in trouble with the Comstock laws. And Comstock himself would sometimes show up at your door. He would impersonate people. He would lie about who he was, that he was seeking medical advice, stuff that is shady and like probably illegal.

[00:14:30] He did. So it was a really wild ride in the 1870s and 80s. Some of the people he persecuted who were mostly women. So we suspect he was kind of misogynist. Some of the people actually, because of his dogged persecution of them committed suicide rather than go to jail. Like the most famous example is Madam Restel, who was an abortionist in New York.

[00:14:51] And actually a new book just came out on her. I can't wait to read it. So there's so much to unpack in this history. And then you look ahead now to like, The book bans, FOSTA and SESTA, all of these moral panics around how like, if children see anything sexual, it will corrupt and pervert them forever. Oh no! Like it's Comstock all over again.

[00:15:10] Gwyn: Yeah. Yeah. And the, We can draw lines directly back to this specific moral panic that this guy, I mean, he wasn't the only one there was a huge moral panic at that point in time, but he was definitely the, mouthpiece for it.

[00:15:29] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah.

[00:15:31] Gwyn: Talk a little bit more about moral panics in general

[00:15:34] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. So this is another one of those sort of amorphous folklore genres that also touches on pop culture in the mass media. So it's kind of tough to define. The way I think about it is um, sort of this widespread frenzied and anxiety over a phenomenon that may be more rooted in fear than in truth.

[00:15:56] I almost said rooted in folklore than truth. When we define something as folklore, we are talking about how it's transmitted, not the content. Some folklore might technically be true. Some might not be true. That's not the defining factor. So stuff that's rooted more in fear than in reality most of the time and stuff that usually ends up targeting a marginalized group as the perpetrators of this thing.

[00:16:17] I think moral panic and conspiracy theory sometimes butt up against each other because conspiracy theories will say The bad thing that's happening is caused by some shadowy elite group, the moral panic will say, aha, we have found our scapegoat. It is the outsider. It is the other who we probably already fear and hate conveniently enough.

[00:16:37] I think that moral panics are also difficult to define and talk about because they're these like giant things that are composed of littler things like rumors might play a part. Urban legends might play a part. Gossip might play a part. We would define these all as discrete to disparate folklore genres, but that almost like the Lego pieces that come together to make the giant monster that is the moral panic and possibly conspiracy theory.

[00:17:01] So again, it's, really difficult to like actually pin down and define, but we see a ton of examples of them like really throughout history and even just in the last century. There are a lot of them that revolve around human sexuality and fear of predators and so on. And even, even non sexual ones.

[00:17:19] So I remember when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, there was this whole like, there's, well, there's the razor blades in the Halloween candy. Poison in the Halloween candy. Some of these things actually happened. There's one or two isolated cases. And then there's the blue star stickers that were given out for Halloween that apparently had acid in them.

[00:17:39] Gwyn: Wow.

[00:17:40] Jeanna Jorgensen: like anyone's gonna waste their good drugs on kids. But it was this real, you know, the whole, you know, the, the white vans coming around to kidnap your children, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, so there've been a variety of moral panics. Some of them are more localized. Some of them are more national. Yeah, there's a ton of them and they're unfortunately very prevalent.

[00:17:58] And when people get whipped up into a frenzy about whatever they're scared of. They don't always take the time. Like the satanic panic is another like really prominent example of a moral panic that happened and had pretty devastating consequences for some people.

[00:18:12] Gwyn: Yeah. I was thinking about that and, how Geraldo jumped on board and made a whole news investigative news piece about Satanists in Oregon or something. It's totally, completely ridiculous and unfounded. But it also made me think of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and how, you know, suddenly every gay person is a horrible human being because they might be carrying a disease that they can't do anything about,

[00:18:40] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. Which is really unfortunate. And like I said, for me, one of the main distinguishing factors is that moral panics often target those who are already marginalized. Whereas conspiracy theories, I mean, they may also like, I I've been looking at some anti semitic conspiracy theories lately. And like, obviously like if you're targeting Jewish people, like there's some marginalization happening here, but conspiracy theories often are positioning the people doing the bad thing as at the top of the social hierarchy, rather than the bottom or the outside of the social hierarchy. So I do think that's one distinction.

[00:19:09] Gwyn: right? So, like, pizzagate versus transphobia.

[00:19:12] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah.

[00:19:17] Gwyn: Sorry, world, we're at a very depressing time, although it seems as though humans are always like this.

[00:19:24] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's part of why I like studying folklore so much is that everybody has folklore and you do see a lot of common themes and folklore like family. There's a lot of stories and customs that revolve around people's families and so on and families look different in different cultures, as one would expect, but there are a lot of common themes that show our shared humanity.

[00:19:45] Gwyn: Are there moral panics going way, way back, like, pre Victorian times that you have evidence of?

[00:19:53] Jeanna Jorgensen: I Haven't done as much historical research. I think one of the classic examples is the witch trials that were spent on for a lot of years. Yeah, so like that for sure. I think like the French Revolution saw a lot of those kind of things unfolding and mass hysteria kind of thing. And going back to antisemitism for a little bit, the legend of the blood libel, like this is wild. There was this Christian legend that we have documented from the 11th century onward in England and continental Europe that Jews were somehow like killing Christian babies to use their blood for ritual purposes.

[00:20:25] I'm Jewish, I'm kind of like, man, I thought blood wasn't kosher. What the heck? it's circulated for over a millennium. This moral panic and like in the middle ages in Europe, certain Jewish people were like brought to court, tried, executed. So I'm just like, dang, like there's a lot going on there.

[00:20:43] So yeah, so some moral panics are tied to religion to social differences, different groups and outsiders. So yeah, they've, been around for sure. That's probably some we don't even know about because they weren't recorded or written down.

[00:20:54] Gwyn: Sure. That is fascinating. First of all, I'm Jewish as well. Yeah. And it makes me think of the rumor that Jewish men have horns which is still I know somebody who's family member, you know, like great aunt still believes this. In Pennsylvania!

[00:21:13] Jeanna Jorgensen: Oh, Oh that's wild. Yeah. I just thought of another example. This isn't super old, but it shows kind of the insider outsider tensions. There was an article I mentioned in the chapter in my book on moral panics, apparently in the Netherlands because they have more immigrants, especially from like North Africa and so on.

[00:21:30] There's this moral panic that was circulating, I think, in either the 90s or 2000s, that gangs of Middle Eastern immigrants, these teenage boys, were running around and committing crimes, essentially. And there was some particular gruesome detail that was attached to that, blah, blah, blah. But like, it was very much like, oh, we're not safe from those outsiders, those immigrants. And in this case, it was an Immigrant and ethnic identity that was being targeted as the apparent perpetrator of crimes that did not happen.

[00:22:00] Gwyn: Yeah. I mean, there's an awful lot of that, scapegoating that happens? It's horrible.

[00:22:06] Jeanna Jorgensen: It really is.

[00:22:07] Gwyn: Humans can be truly horrible.

[00:22:10] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, is, yeah, that is, that is sadly one of, one of the themes of my book too, unfortunately.

[00:22:18] Gwyn: But it's, useful to be able to understand that and put some context around what is happening in the world. You know, I have this fantasy that the world will become a better place. And I aim to make that happen, part of that is doing this. I also believe that, a big part of why we're here is to, learn and to go through these cycles. And that's why we go through these cycles as a culture as cultures throughout, history and prehistory. I am certain that prehistoric people also told your mom jokes I mentioned, or, made fun of each other's penis size or whatever it is. It's fascinating to me. Can you give us some more examples of how specifically sexuality shows up in folklore in the way that we talk about it perhaps?

[00:23:11] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. I think there are a lot of folk beliefs around pregnancy and conception. So that's a really common one that you can avoid conception by jumping up and down after having sex, by showering immediately, by having sex in a hot tub. By douching with various substances that you should probably not douche with, like, sodas.

[00:23:33] You know, the weird thing is, again, like I, as with a lot of reproductive advice and responsibility in this world. A lot of it is directed at the person with the uterus as though it doesn't take two to tango. So that is kind of like we see broader cultural things reflected in the folklore for sure.

[00:23:51] And so there's a lot of that. And I think there's a lot of lack of understanding of biology and reproductive and pleasure anatomy. Why certain things would work or not work. A lot of people just don't have that awareness in part because we still don't have universal, medically accurate and inclusive sex education for all.

[00:24:13] But yeah, I think sometimes folklore does reflect misunderstandings and does perpetuate falsehood, unfortunately. So that can definitely be a thing. I think there are also a lot of urban legends about sexual mishaps and encounters that again, just perpetuate gender roles and gender norms in ways that are very heteronormative and saying that, this girl was sleeping around and blah, blah happened. And then whatever, whatever slut shaming.

[00:24:38] There's actually a series of legends that go back to when the HIV epidemic was starting and then kind of percolating through culture where this college girl goes on a spring break trip to somewhere tropical and exotic. She meets and is wooed by this exotic sexy man. And at the end of the week they have sex and then he sends her back on the plane with a little box. Saying let's talk soon and tells her not to open the box until she gets on the plane and she gets on the plane opening the box expecting something like, you know, maybe an engagement ring or some kind of token and inside is a tiny coffin that says welcome to the world of AIDS.

[00:25:16] Which one of my folklore colleagues living in Newfoundland, Diane Goldstein, collected this and Newfoundland is like a very tiny isolated part of Canada, apparently. And so the fact that it was being told there was very much about risk aversion and this idea like, oh, we don't have that illness here. It's people over there, people outside our community who are the risky ones. We're, we're safe, we're mostly good. So, yeah.

[00:25:41] Gwyn: Wow. That was a piece that I hadn't even taken from that .I had a similar version of that story that I'm not going to be able to recall all the details. I grew up in Las Vegas. I ran a well, at that time, we called it a gay youth group, but now we would call it a queer youth group when I was a teenager and part of our mission was to try and deal with it was the height of the AIDS panic. And so we did a lot of educating of other kids brought in a lot of people. And, I recall a story like that. And so at that point, I, didn't have the us versus them concept. It was just about, AIDS, about HIV and the panic that that brought. But wow, that's a whole new dimension that I hadn't really even considered.

[00:26:28] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. And because folklore, it only circulates when it's relevant 'cause it's not a part of our institutions. It's the same way, like the law or the educational system, as if it's not relevant, it dies. So when it travels to new places a new, a story or a custom whatever will adapt to this local things or else it'll die out. So, you know, it became relevant in Newfoundland by taking that insider outsider thing to an extreme. Again, like it's weird to look at the story as a piece of data. Cause in one way it is like, it's a legend. It's not necessarily true, but it does on the good side, there's nothing good about this, but like on the plus side, it's, it reveals that HIV transmission can happen through heterosexual sex.

[00:27:04] And a lot of people were ignorant to that whether on purpose or not through bigotry early on so like that's like plus side, but you know minus side there's an outsider who's the perpetrator and consent violations and blah blah blah. So it is it is a mixed bag for sure but for us it's a data point.

[00:27:22] Gwyn: Yeah. And I imagine that it wouldn't carry the same weight today now that we have cocktails that will actually keep people alive. And AIDS is not the death sentence that it used to be.

[00:27:33] Jeanna Jorgensen: I don't know if it's still circulating as widely. So yeah, you're probably right.

[00:27:36] Gwyn: I'd be interested to see how it morphs in 20 years how it'll show up in something. It's like, it reminds me of that classic campfire tale of the guy with the hook who comes after the teenagers who are making out or whatever in their car.

[00:27:51] Jeanna Jorgensen: And that's another classic example with, sexual connection, which is, this is illicit behavior. They know they have to go to the outskirts of town to have some privacy and to make out and so on. So one of my favorite arguments to make about urban legends is they may seem really risky and taboo and like, Ooh, it's very wild and sensational.

[00:28:11] Like you're being a little teenage edgelord by telling the scariest or goriest one. But if you look at enough of them, especially the ones about fast food, the Kentucky fried rat, the roach and the taco bell, they're gross. There's, there's a lot of this. So there's like fast food ones.

[00:28:24] There's a bunch of ones of like mishaps with babysitters. Babysitters who are on drugs, all kinds of terrible things. The man with the hook. If you look below the surface, like content of like ha ha drugs and things and very illicit things, you look down to what's being critiqued or criticized. Well, you wouldn't be out eating gross fast food if you had a woman at home who was cooking for you. Well, gosh, your children wouldn't be in danger if you just stay home with them and not hire a babysitter.

[00:28:53] So it's like at the heart of them, urban legends are actually criticizing modern secular urban society as being dangerous because we have strayed from traditional ways.

[00:29:04] Gwyn: Yeah. That's a really interesting perspective that, again, I just never thought about because I'm thinking about it on a surface level of, oh, that's so silly. I feel like I should have asked that in the beginning, but how is it that you came to Folklore and Sex Ed 101? Tell us a little bit about your background, I guess.

[00:29:23] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. So I grew up in Los Angeles and I'm just very lucky to have parents who are, were classic generational hippies and were very chill and relaxed. So I grew up in a very shame free environment for which I am so grateful. And I was a voracious reader from a very early age. So I got to college and I was like, well, I think I want to be a writer.

[00:29:44] I don't know. I'll major in history and be a teacher while I figure things out. I had a couple of really impactful history teachers in high school, and I was at UC Berkeley, and my very first semester I took intro to cultural anthropology intro to religious studies intro to linguistics and a freshman seminar on fairy tales.

[00:30:04] And by the end of that semester I was like, I need all of these things put together as one thing forever. And that's kind of what folklore studies is like we are in a discipline. We do touch on anthropology as well as literature as well as religion as well as a million other things. So I'm like, dang, this is great. I will never be bored.

[00:30:21] And then I learned like right after that semester that Alan Dundas, who's one of the most influential folklorists of our generation was at UC Berkeley. So I started taking classes with him immediately, including like graduate seminars when I was an undergrad. And from the start, he was very much like, If it exists, it's our duty to study it.

[00:30:38] I don't care if it's taboo. I don't care if it's filthy, disgusting, full of horrible bigotry and stereotypes. If it is a product of humanity, we, as scholars, should study it and understand it. And that, of course, included a lot of sexual content. So, he had one article or a book chapter on dead baby jokes. He had another one on light bulbs and screwing. There's a lot of how many does it take to screw in, whatever. So, there's a lot of sexual innuendos there. So his scholarship was in that vein. I was just like, dang, this is cool. So, I was also raised in a family with a lot of teachers and a very strong undercurrent of feminism.

[00:31:14] So, I've just had this like lifelong passion for feminist theory and gender studies. I took a gender studies minor for my PhD. And queer theory, as soon as I could roll that in there. So when I finished my PhD and I was like, I'm going to be a professor. Oh, wait, there's no more jobs. I wanted to stay in academia somehow.

[00:31:31] And after like a decade of struggle, I am now very happily a lecturer at Butler. So I have some job stability, hooray. But at some point during that decade, I was like, Oh, What if this doesn't work out? What do I want to do with my life? I don't even know, man. And I just, while I had been at IU I hadn't done a lot with the Kinsey Institute personally, but I started writing a blog for Dr. Debbie Herbenik, who does amazing work. And I was like, Oh yeah, sex ed. Oh yeah, this is cool. Oh wait, I've already been kind of doing this because just as a very no nonsense, shame free, but very well, knowledgeable person, I was already the person that my friends came to with sex questions and things like that.

[00:32:10] And I was like, well, I don't know, but I know a book about it. So at some point in like 2013 or 14, I was like, I think I want to start doing this. So I just started reading a lot and started going to things like Catalyst Con and Woodhull when I could. So I've been doing a series of conferences, been to a couple of AASECT conferences. I did a SAR, a sexual attitude reassessment just for kicks, I guess. And so I thought about pursuing certification as a sex educator. I was like, well, I have a PhD. That's like automatic legitimacy in a lot of people's eyes anyway. What kind of sex ed work do I want to do? I don't know. And then by the time I was like thinking through all of this stuff while learning all of the things my academic career was kind of getting back on track.

[00:32:48] So I was like, well, I guess I'll do some talks and do some writing still, but like be more of the academic side, like studying sex education as a field and its history and all the folklore intersections. So that's kind of where I've landed today. And I'm definitely still figuring things out, but I just enjoy the field so much. I love all the people I've met. It's been really, really fun.

[00:33:11] Gwyn: Wow, what a ride! I'm fascinated. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of sex ed?

[00:33:21] Jeanna Jorgensen: So it's deeply intertwined with folklore because school sex education has only existed in the U S since 1913. That was the first real public school attempt at sex ed. Uh was in Chicago. It was called the Chicago experiment. It was pioneered by Dr. Ella Flag Young, who was one of the first women to get a PhD and so on and education, all that cool stuff.

[00:33:41] And she was like, the kids seem to need this. We're going to give them this at the kids loved it. The parents hated it. In fact, part of the reason they got in trouble was because of the Comstock laws, because the parents were like, can we see the materials our kids are getting in school? And like 1913, it was really tame from our perspective, like maybe the basics of reproduction in very veiled language, like very tame, very chill.

[00:34:03] But they found out that they couldn't mail the information pack is home to the parents because of the Comstock laws. So then the refrain of the newspapers became, you know, well, if it's too vile to mail, it's too vile to teach. So

[00:34:15] Gwyn: Boy.

[00:34:16] Jeanna Jorgensen: that's, yeah, so that was the whole thing. So it stopped, but, and then it came later for other reasons, but but yeah, like, so throughout human history, if we haven't had public school sex education, it happens informally, which is the realm of folklore. So it's very much like, do you overhear conversations between older family members or friends? I mean, in rural farming communities, kids are going to see animal reproduction happening and be able to extrapolate some things for sure.

[00:34:43] So there's that, but yeah, it was, it was informal. It was through hearing stories, rumors, gossip. Things you maybe shouldn't overhear, but did. People piece it together. And yeah, so folklore has always played a huge role in sex education.

[00:34:57] Gwyn: And not a great one most of the time it's.

[00:35:00] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, it's a mixed bag for sure. Again, like I'm definitely a fan of having like factual sex education that everyone has access to ideally. And, you know, ironically, like folklore continues to coexist with institutional and official forms of culture. So you may sit through a sex ed class and be like, We just did a fact sheet on the uterus. Cool. Cool. I learned some things, but then some kid behind you was whispering some joke. And so you're getting the informal folkloric side of it at the same time. They can coexist and they do.

[00:35:30] Gwyn: Yeah. I would say that that's probably most of our lives is it, we're lucky to get some facts and folklore is everywhere.

[00:35:39] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, for sure. And even in more abstract ways, like one of the main areas I study is fairy tales. And so I study everything from like traditional classical European fairy tales, you know, Brothers Grimm onward. Through contemporary fairytale retellings that like, make it feminist, make it queer, do all the things. That's my main area of study in my academic life.

[00:36:00] And so the fact that we have this term, the 'happily ever after' that we see used in romance novels that we see used in weddings. Oh, I want a fairytale wedding. It means that a lot of these heteronormative gender roles from the classic fairy tales are still with us and determining what we think happiness looks like. And it's presumed monogamous relationships and marriages. So it's just, it's this very weird, twisty influence that we get from one genre of folklore fairy tales into, again, these sort of broader social expectations around marriages to the point where, you know, people have Disney weddings, fairytale weddings, getaway weddings, a million kind of weddings that's influenced by fairy tales, among other things.

[00:36:41] Gwyn: Which I personally find fascinating because most fairy tales, I don't know, I'm talking out of my ass, I am not the learned, educated person here, but it seems to me that throughout history, fairy tales have been moral guidelines, and are often very distressing and then we get to Disney. And he and his company and where we are now, and I refer to it as the Disneyfication of life you know, like the Little Mermaid specifically, or, any of those that are like, that's not how it ended. That's not the way that Hans Christian Andersen wrote it, but now we have this beautiful, happy ending.

[00:37:16] Jeanna Jorgensen: yeah, no, and the weird thing about fairy tales too is like they do sometimes have those moral guidelines but throughout much of their history they've been more for adults than for kids. They were told like by and for adults like you think of the stories in the Arabian Nights and things like that like you don't want your kids knowing those stories necessarily.

[00:37:31] There's like, demon sex, there's an orgy, there's all kinds of weird shit. In the 1690s, in the court of Louis XIV, Charles Perrault and the other noble women around him, they were writing fairytales for each other to be read aloud in salons along with poetry and music and stuff like that.

[00:37:45] Full grown adults writing and reading fairy tales because they could slip in political critique. So there's this long history of adults using fairy tales to like talk about our own ideas and morals and messages. And then the Brothers Grimm came along in the early 1900s and, oh sorry, 1800s and they were collecting fairy tales to advance this sort of German nationalist romantic agenda because Germany wasn't Germany yet.

[00:38:08] Napoleon was rolling through and wrecking shit and they thought if they could demonstrate that German people had a shared heritage, they deserve to be a country. So they started collecting fairy tales from a very scholarly lens and they were trained as linguists and historians and all these things.

[00:38:24] And then at some point they're like, Oh, these are selling cool. Oh wait, people are reading them to their kids. Oh, do our stories reflect well on the image of German motherhood and things like that? So they took their stories and they changed them over the course of 1812 when the first edition appeared to 1857 when their final edition appeared and they left some of the violence in because that was thought to be an appropriate way of giving children messages at the time, even though we don't think of that now with children's literature.

[00:38:50] But they toned down the sex because that was inappropriate and they made all these little changes. Like some of their fairy tales did come from French tellers who had migrated to the German regions. Like, Oh, there's a fairy that's too French let's make her a sorceress or whatever. So the Grimm's really started this trend of toning it down for kids.

[00:39:07] And then Disney, as you point out, leapt on that and he's like, we're going to make money. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. And yeah, it really like help shift fairy tales in that direction in the popular perception for a while now.

[00:39:20] Gwyn: Wow. Thank you. I didn't know any of that. And it makes me wonder who were the people that were doing that before the Grimms, right? So. We have this habit, humans, of starting something out as an adult for adults, by adults, and then it filters down to the kids. I mean, look at kids bop records, right?

[00:39:42] Those songs are not for children. I raised my kids to be very open minded, but there's some things that their little psyches just cannot handle. And, you know, that's okay. But it must, they couldn't have been the first people to do that. That must have been happening throughout, the world.

[00:40:03] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:04] I mean, I think there was, yeah, there was a sense that, folk tales and fairy tales. There were some that were like usually buying for adults, there were some more simplistic like little moral tales or animal tales like Aesop's tables, those are more clearly, these are for kids, they have very strong moral messages.

[00:40:17] But it's always been a mix, and it's always been like adults are among the audiences as well as kids. And I think that there are definitely some like raunchy and risque versions of fairy tales that adults tell with kids in the room, knowing that some things will just go right over their little heads.

[00:40:32] Gwyn: Like The Simpsons, right? I mean, they're so great at having the adult jokes as well as the kid

[00:40:39] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's this fundamental tension. Cause one of the other things happening there is that. In medieval Europe, the idea of childhood as it exists now was different. It didn't really exist in the same way it does for us that came along in like the 1700s, the 1800s, and hence like children's literature as a concept is new, just a couple centuries old.

[00:40:59] But the conundrum of children's literature is that kids don't have money. Kids can't buy their own books. So children's literature is written by adults. for adults with kids in mind. So it's just this very weird tension and contradiction that fairytales are a part of because fairytales have become a part of children's literature and children's culture.

[00:41:19] But yeah, I just, I feel like people don't talk about that enough. Like, when you're making a movie that, you know, kids want to see, you got to throw in a little something for the parents because the parents have to take their kids to the movie theater.

[00:41:29] Gwyn: Right, right. Well, are there other things that we haven't touched on that you want to be sure that gets out there?

[00:41:36] Jeanna Jorgensen: I'm really just here to talk about how awesome folklore is and how it's everywhere in our lives and how it's very intertwined with not only sex education, but the history of sex education, these urban legends, these moral panics have been happening for over a century and influencing policy, among other things. I feel like we've talked about that. Yeah, I just, I love all of this stuff.

[00:41:58] Gwyn: It's fascinating stuff. And I would encourage folks to try and start seeing it where they haven't before. Because it really is everywhere.

[00:42:08] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, I feel like once you understand that folklore is just the peer to peer and face to face stuff that we do it's our social glue. It's your family's holiday traditions. It's customs that you do with the turning of the seasons. It's things that you do for rituals and rites of passage like going from youth to adulthood or from single to married. It's all the stories we tell. It's basically everything that is not regulated by an institution or gatekept in the same way that pop culture is gatekept. Like you have to have a producer and a contract and blah, blah, blah.

[00:42:38] Folklore is all the other stuff that we do in all of our free time that we do for fun because no one is holding a weapon to your head being like, you have to celebrate Thanksgiving this way or else, no one's going to send you to jail for celebrating a holiday the way your family did. Like there might be social consequences. There might be unpleasantness, but people do folklore. It is opt in culture. We do it because it does something for us.

[00:43:02] And because of that, when you study folklore, you put your finger on the pulse of what people actually care about. So that's why I'm so passionate about this is I feel like we can learn so much about it. And then you put folklore in conversation with sex. It's this whole other dimension because sex for many Western people, especially Americans, we live in such a sex negative culture.

[00:43:23] It is so taboo. It is so shameful. We have so much fricking baggage. And in some ways, folklore is complicit in that. I think there's a lot of sex negative folklore that circulates because it just validates how people already feel. But in other ways, folklore can be very liberating.

[00:43:38] You can look at another culture's folklore. You can look at another subculture within your own country and be like, Oh, I'll think about this differently. Maybe our attitudes and ideas about sex or about gender norms or about different sexualities don't have to be immutable and set in stone and terrible all the time. Like maybe there are other ways of doing this.

[00:43:55] Maybe listening to someone else's personal narrative about some experience they had, something that was really enlightening for them. Maybe that can help you learn something too. So yeah, I'm, I'm just here to wave the folklore banner and be really excited about it and hope that other people also get really excited about it.

[00:44:12] Gwyn: Well, I think it's really exciting, which leads me to my last question, which is Jeanna Jorgensen. What excites you?

[00:44:20] Jeanna Jorgensen: I really love good food. I love trying food from all different nationalities. I love wine tasting. I love beer tasting. If it is local, if it is a specialty, if it is meaningful to someone, I want to put it in my mouth and enjoy it.

[00:44:38] Gwyn: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm right there with you. I'm such a foodie. There are some things that I'm like, yeah, I won't have that again, but, but okay, it's good to try. where can people find you pick up copies of your book, that sort of thing?

[00:44:55] Jeanna Jorgensen: Yeah, for sure. So I'm selling copies of my book at www. folklore101. com, just the numerals 101. You can also find my books Folklore 101, Fairy Tales 101, and Sex Education 101 on all the major retailers online. I'm still on Twitter as it's dying its last gasping breaths. My handle is FoxyFolklorist, and as soon as I migrate to other platforms. I will probably try to have that same handle, but yeah, my name is pretty unique. So I'm pretty easy to find on, the interwebs.

[00:45:29] Gwyn: Awesome. This has been truly delightful thank you for coming on and doing this with me.

[00:45:34] Jeanna Jorgensen: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:45:43] Gwyn: I know I ask this every time. But I really, really would love to hear what you're taking away from this conversation. Perhaps something about the nature of moral panics or how folklore is all around us. I don't know. You tell me, which you can do at the website for the podcast, which is called whatexcitesus. com. And then you should head over to Folklore101. com and pick up a copy of Sex Education 101 so you can learn more about how our sex ed systems came to be and some ideas on improving it moving forward so that future generations can have access to medically accurate, dogma free sex ed, which you know I believe will help make the world a better place, and I bet you feel that way too.

[00:46:29] They tell me, you know, them, that I'm supposed to remind you that I have a Patreon. And so that if you would like to support this work and get bonus content, you can do that at patreon. com slash whatexcitesus. Or, of course, you can just head over to the website whatexcitesus. com where you can do all sorts of things, including going to my Patreon.

[00:46:53] You could also listen to previous episodes, read all the show notes, check out some transcriptions, and you can record a message for me. And I really do love to hear these. So please, It would be so kind, so kind, if you would just do that, click the little button, I think it says talk to me and then you can record a message and you send it to me right there from your phone or your computer or whatever works for you and it can be anonymous if you want, or you can tell me who you are. It's all good. Thanks for listening. What Excites Us is produced, edited, and hosted by me, Gwyn Isaacs. My podcast host is Tickle. Life. All the music I use is under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The opening song is The Vendetta by Stefan Kartenberg, and this is Quando by Julius H. love y'all.