Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll speak with Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist, Jazzmeia Horn, who is about to begin a residency at Smoke Jazz Club. We'll be joined by Harvard theoretical astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, whose new book is titled Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars. We'll talk about the social and political history of Pockets with author Hannah Carlson. That's the plan so let's get this started with Samantha Bee.

Everyone seemed to have a story about the time, they had to learn something in the real life that they should have been taught in sex ed. Unfortunately, some people, like certain lawmakers who support laws such as bans on six-week abortions, clearly did not pay attention to what that gym coach or guidance counselor attempted to explain in basic biology. Enter Samantha Bee, who on her Late Night show Full Frontal would often school officials, pardon the pun, literally, she had a segment called Sex Ed for Senators.

This Saturday, the Daily Show alum brings her expertise to BAM with a show called Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education. For seven season, Bee was the host of Full Frontal, one of the very few female Late Night hosts, and would cover topics like menopause, reproductive healthcare, and the phenomenon of women's pain going overlooked by doctors. Instead of doing it in the TV box, now she's taking it to the stage touring in her one-woman show, and Samantha Bee joins me in studio, so nice to see you.

Sam: It's so nice to see you. I'm so excited to be here. I would just be listening to you in my home if I wasn't physically here so this is very joyful.

Alison: Well, this is exciting. Very meta. Hey, listeners, we would love to get you in on this conversation. What is something you wish you'd learned in sex education? Do you have a revealing story or a fun or even embarrassing moment about a time you had to learn about the human body in real life? We're going to keep it clean. Keep Julianne on our toes with the dump button. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We would love for you to join us on air. You can call in or you can text to us at that number as well. Social media's available as well.

If you would like to remain anonymous, you can DM us @allofitwnyc, that's both Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it, and Instagram. What do you remember about how you were taught sex ed, Sam?

Sam: Oh, boy. Well, my mother was, I will say a little bit of a libertine, so she taught me, [laughs] so she taught me everything, far too much by handing me a booklet that really outlined, absolutely everything that you never needed to know at the age of seven or eight. In pairing with that, I went to Catholic school, so I both learned nothing and everything in equal measure. Then I taught everyone in my school everything I had learned from my little red book.

Alison: What a combo.

Sam: I know. Quite a combo.

Alison: What did that do to young Sam Bee's head?

Sam: It made me an educator. Gave me purpose, I think.

Alison: What is something that you wish that all sex ed courses contained?

Sam: Well, first of all, I wish that the sex education classes taught us the more than just the basics. I do wish that more of us could emerge from our sex education training without the vast depths of shame that we all seem to carry with us. In the course of creating this touring show, I really learned that only in, I think 17 out of 50 states is sex education mandated to be medically accurate. I think that that is a statistic that was astonishing to me. I literally cannot believe it.

As my gynecologist, Dr. Rohatgi likes to say, they really only teach you enough in sex education now, so that you know that if you get an STI, you should just be ashamed. They're like, they only teach you enough to know that you should be really embarrassed that you have it, which of course, you shouldn't.

Alison: All of us have been sharing our stories. My mother was a biology teacher.

Sam: Oh, well, okay.

Alison: I just got the textbook and the model.

Sam: That's it.

Alison: That's the way that went.

Sam: I was recalling for someone telling my-- trying to teach my own children. I have three children the basics of sex education. My husband and I were so earnest about it, and we gathered them around when we felt like it was their time, and we went through it and we were so sensitive about it, but also so true, just so real about it. They were all like, "Okay, okay, okay," and they walked away, didn't seem that impacted, and then one full year later, they came back to us and they were like, "Hey, can you just run us through how babies are born again because when you told us the first time, it was so boring that we don't remember?" We had to do it a second time, but it was much faster.

Alison: The sequel.

Sam: Yes.

Alison: Let's talk to Maria, calling in from Morris Plains, New Jersey. Hi, Maria. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Sam: Hi.

Maria: Hi, Alison. Hi, Samantha. You guys, I'm a big fan and I just wanted to just share with you as fellow woman, I just found out that I went through menopause and I didn't even know it until I went OBGYN and she talked to me, very casually, "Oh, yes, you got some vaginal atrophy." I'm like, "What? What is going on here?" Nobody talks about it and so many women suffer. I've been looking for menopause specialists online for about three months now.

When I found out that I was going through all this change, and it's just so overwhelming that it's not talked about freely, even my own girlfriends that are having such a hard time with it, don't want to talk about it. It's really, really hard. I love the segment and thank you so much for talking about it.

Sam: I really feel for you. I feel like we do, we carry a lot of that. We carry the waters of shame with us. It's so embarrassing to talk-- it was embarrassing for me to talk about, and I have a really supportive partner in life. I've been married for a long time and even still, I was really hesitant. We are just conditioned to think that it is this weird thing that's only happening to us, and then we get to this age or this stage of life, and we look around and we're like, "It's just me, right? It's just me that wakes up at two o'clock in the morning every morning to make spaghetti sauce," or whatever. It's a terrible feeling.

Alison: When you were sitting down hearing Maria's voice and hearing how difficult it was for her and hearing your own stories. Would you have to sit down, you're also an entertainer. You're asking people to come to a theater and watch you talk about menopause. How did you think about balancing the accuracy of it but also your job as an entertainer?

Sam: Well, I'm a big believer in fact-checking, so I definitely-- my show is professionally fact-checked. It's like very, very important to me. Actually, as a departure from how I've been in my career, it's a little bit more personal this show. I talk really openly about what I personally experienced as I'm in perimenopause myself because I feel like I just want to say it out loud. All that is left is for me to speak the truth of my experience. I think it's really helpful for people just to say it, just to say the words is really freeing and it's vulnerable, and it's hilarious all at the same time. Like, it feels great.

Alison: My guess is Samantha Bee, the name of the show is Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education. It'll be at BAM this Saturday. Jenny is calling us from Stanford, Connecticut. Hi, Jenny. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Sam: Hey.

Jenny: Good morning, and I love both of you, and this is my first time ever calling into a radio show, so I'm so excited.

Alison: Oh, thank you.

Jenny: By the way, I am post-menopausal, embrace girls.

Alison: Nice.

Jenny: Anyway, here's the deal. When I was in ninth grade, we had a very prudish sex ed teacher, with the big cameo, hanging off the front of her turtleneck kind of thing. Anyway, she was telling us what oral sex was, and she described it as the equivalent of a French kiss, like tongues meeting each other. That was fine, that's the definition. Then a couple weeks later, I'm with a group of my friends, large, and somebody decided to take a poll on who had had oral sex, and I jumped up, raised my hands, I've done it. I've had oral sex. Oh, yes. No, not me.

Sam: Oh my gosh. That's hilarious. I used to have a friend who was sure she heard the word wrong, and she announced at the Thanksgiving table to her entire family, that she was a narcoleptic, sorry, not a narcoleptic. What do you-- a necrophiliac when she meant-- she was like, "I'm a necrophiliac , everyone." They were like, "What?" She was like, "I fall asleep all the time." I got the story backwards, but I think that's hilarious.

Alison: Jenny, thank you for calling in. Cecilia is calling from Highland Park, New Jersey. Hi, Cecilia, thanks for sharing your story.

Cecilia: Hi, Alison and Sam. I love your show, Alison, and I am so sad that you're no longer on TV, Sam.

Sam: Oh, thank you.

Cecilia: My story is back in the '60s, I was one of 10 children that my mother had birthed, 9 of whom were still living. We had, for some reason, sex ed classes. I watched it. I came back. I said to my mom, "Mom, I've heard about the sperm and I've heard about the egg, but how does the sperm get to the egg?" There was this deathly silage and she goes, "That's for married people." It's contrasted with my aunt who was on a farm and she brought her kids out to watch a calf being born. She was ready to answer all questions.

When it was done, one looked to the other and said, "Hey, Chuck, let's go play ball." Thanks so much for this opportunity.

Sam: That's amazing.

Alison: Thanks for sharing your story. Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. What is something you wish you learned in sex education? Maybe you have a revealing story or a funny story about a time you'd learned something about sex ed in real life. Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. By us, I mean my guest, Samantha Bee, is with us in studio. The name of her show is Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education. It's happening this Saturday at BAM. On your show, you did these segments about sex ed for senators. You used to wear this '70s denim vest with the body parts on it. The cool teachers might've worn.

Sam: Oh, sure.

Alison: There's a patch of a heart and a strawberry and a uterus, and I think a purple penis. I think that's what that was. Any costume changes for this show? What are the visuals like?

Sam: Gee, the visuals actually, there are a lot of visuals because, in keeping with the way I like to do things on Full Frontal, I love visual aids. I think it's actually very important. It's a real multimedia. It's a real multimedia experience. It's an oral and a visual experience.

Alison: There you are [unintelligible 00:12:33].

Sam: No punky vests though. I'm not wearing an ankh around my neck and a cool '70s denim vest.

Alison: When you're writing a show like this, who's your reader? Who's the person that you bring in to tell you like, "That's great, Sam, or we need to rework this"?

Sam: Oh, my gosh. I definitely worked with a small and amazing team of women who I've worked with for many, many years. It was just the four of us, sitting together, building this show, building the visuals, and really building a show for ourselves actually. It really felt like putting it out there. I really didn't know what it would be like to present this material to an audience.

It felt like a real risk actually, but post a television show, I felt like taking a risk was the best way to move forward, and the material is something that's so important to me. I feel like once we got it in front of an audience, the first time I went, "Okay, this is good. I love this."

Alison: What was first time like?

Sam: I was scared. It felt like a real departure. Not that live performing as a departure. That's not, but just being so open. Talking about my own body in this capacity, that was very, very new to me. It's hard to do.

Alison: Got a tweet from Jennifer. "I wish my sex ed class had instructed us on how to obtain contraception. As a child raised in a very Christian household, I had no idea how to access over-the-counter birth control in college and I was very fearful my parents would find out and kick me out of the house." That's the very serious part about this.

Sam: Yes, it's very serious.

Alison: That people aren't getting the education they need. The fear factor in here, I think is something to talk about.

Sam: I find it so appalling that so many of our political leaders, parent leaders, and school boards really want to keep this information away from people. Not teaching sex education doesn't stop people from having sex. It just makes the sex a lot drier and a lot worse, and the whole experience of it scary, terrifying.

Alison: When you're working on your show, what was maybe the most unbelievable thing or the most egregious thing you heard a lawmaker say about reproductive rights? Maybe ignorant is actually.

Sam: There are so many, but there is one guy and his name is going to escape me, and we definitely use a clip of his from the show where he talks about his expertise in animal husbandry. He talks about how he has birthed calves in the past. He's seen how cows do it and reproduce. He thinks he knows a little bit about women's reproductive junk. It really is unfathomable.

Alison: Let's talk to Jackie, calling in from Westchester. Hi, Jackie. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Jackie: Thank you so much. I'm a post-menopausal woman myself, piggybacking on the other callers who lamented the lack of information and preventive and proactive stuff but I'm really calling because there are some houses of worship and faith that are taking, not just sex education, but all of the relationship-building skills and values into religious education in a way that's very meaningful and very respectful of adolescents and young adults. Unitarian Universalists and United Church of Christ had developed a program called Our Whole Lives or OWL.

I wish that my kids had done that. I wish that I had had something like that. It was a way to build understanding of sex as it pertains to being in a relationship and all of the difficult, awkward, uncomfortable stuff that's all wrapped up in that, consent, respect, emotions, hormones. I just wanted to share that with you.

Sam: Wow, I can't stop nodding at what you just said. That's really beautiful. I really wish that someone had taught about consent. No one ever did.

Alison: I think our kids are about the same age, and it's a big part of sex education now.

Sam: It's a big part of what they learn. They learn the boundaries of their body. They learn about bodily autonomy in a way that it didn't come up. You just felt your way through that with a lot of trial and error, and often terrible and often terrible circumstances.

Alison: You can also continue to learn. At first, I'll be fully honest, when I first heard of enthusiastic consent, I was like, "Enthusiastic?"

Sam: What does that mean?

Alison: Different than consent. Really, it was interesting to talk to him and his friends about what that actually means. It's important.

Sam: I think it's very important. It's very pleasing actually to see my own children have such a better understanding of where they stop and other people start and how it's arming them, I guess, or it's just equipping them. It's just giving them the tools to walk this earth just knowing themselves so much better and freely doing.

Alison: Let's talk to Bob from Brooklyn. Hi, Bob. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Bob: Thank you. I am a first-time caller here. I just have another funny story about my early sexual education. My mother, this is in the '60s, I was in the third grade and at that time, my mother was actually very progressive about trying to get sex education introduced into our church Sunday school and some other things. An attempt to educate us as me and my sister, who was a year younger, so we're in the second and third grade. She's sitting, we're next to her.

She's got a book with pictures of dogs and it's demonstrating the sex and talk about how the penis is inserted into vagina and this is how they reproduce. Well, I walked away from that thinking to myself, "Gee, I'm sure glad people don't have to do that."

Alison: How terrible would that be? Bob, thank you for calling.

Sam: That's so funny.

Alison: Our phone lines are available to you, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can join us on air. You can also text to us at that number. My guess is Samantha Bee. We're talking about her show, Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education. It'll be at BAM this Saturday. We'll have more of your calls and more with Sam after this quick break. This is All Of It. This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, my guest is Samantha Bee, her show, Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education will be at BAM this Saturday.

We're taking your calls about what you learned or didn't learn in sex education. When you're writing material like this, who do you imagine the audience to be, Sam?

Sam: I honestly just think of myself. I think, "What is the show that I would want to see?" That's how I've always created all of my material. I just create for a person just like myself, and then trust that other people are on the same path and will respond to the material.

Alison: Now, BAM's pretty big space. Have you done it smaller spaces at all?

Sam: I've done it in small spaces, large spaces. I just love doing it in spaces. I look out into that crowd and I see the eyes of the people listening to these personal stories, and I feel very affirmed.

Alison: Do you ever have people talk back to you? Is there [crosstalk]

Sam: No, it's not that type of show. It definitely has the cadence of an episode of Full Frontal, so it just kind of like moves through the material, but it's there's something-- I think there is a communion in the room, and that is very special to me. I feel like we are all in it together.

Alison: Let's talk to Logan calling in from Boise, Idaho actually. Hi, Logan. Thanks for calling in.

Logan: Hi. Thanks so much. In terms of conversations about sex and sex education, I think the inclusion of asexuality would've been something that would've been very helpful to me because I did not realize that I was actually asexual until I was over 30 years old. It's just something that doesn't come up. It's not represented in mainstream media and it's something that doesn't really come up in conversations about sex. For a very long time, I actually thought that I was gay because that was something that was more heavily discussed.

I thought, "Okay, well, if I'm not feeling sexual attraction to men, I must be gay, I must be sexually attracted to women." Then when that did not happen, eventually I did discover asexuality and realize, "Okay, yes, I do have a libido but I am asexual," and it's just something that would've never come up in any sex ed class that I ever took.

Alison: Logan, thank you so much for calling in.

Sam: Yes, really information is power. Being able to ask questions, being able to read about yourself, being able to be frank in a space. It's vital.

Alison: Why do you think people are so frightened of information, certain people?

Sam: I think it threatens power, existing power structures. I think that is ultimately like if you trace it all the way back, it just threatens people who are very comfortable in the spaces they inhabit, and they don't want to make space for other people or other ideas. People really idealize in a lot of ways, a past that maybe never was, or their childhood when things seemed simpler, and the grass was green, and they were riding their bike on the sidewalks.

Alison: There was only cow's milk, milk away.

Sam: Only cow's milk. You know what I mean? There, but that's not the world that we live in, and it is has never been the world that we actually lived in.

Alison: Let's see, a text, "Straight people still have a lot to learn from the queer community about sex education." That's where the idea of enthusiastic consent comes from. Thank you for texting that in. Let's talk to Nick from Queens. Hi, Nick. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Nick: Oh, wow, I got on. Thanks for having me, Alison. I just want to say exact-- I called to talk about communication between just sexual partners and everything. I'm a member of the LGBTQ community. I'm in an open relationship with my girlfriend. When people see how well we can communicate about things in general but also about that they're always just blown away. I feel like in sex ed, obviously, consent's super important and it should like it needs to be addressed and talked about, but there's never any talk about like, "Hey, how do you communicate with a partner during the act of it? How do you feel comfortable?"

Samantha, like what you were just saying about power structures and guys are always like, "Oh--" I think it's like a Seinfeld thing. Guys are always like, "Oh, I've got the move. I know exactly what the move is." That move might have worked for one partner but it's might not work for the other, and it's just people just need to be more comfortable with communicating.

Sam: Oh my God, I could not agree more. Thanks for calling in. Thank you.

Alison: Denise calling from Chelsea. Hi, Denise. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Denise: Thank you very much. Longtime listener, huge fan. I had the opportunity to be in Samantha Bee's audience when she had her TV show. Love you. My sex education was initiated primarily by the Girl Scouts of America. I'm a child of the '60s and we were all 13, I think they didn't want us to get pregnant so they we had several meetings where they discussed heterosex, and I think it was successful in getting us all pregnant. We were a little bit baffled that this was happening at a Girl Scout meeting.

Alison: I can understand that. Denise, thank you for calling in. We've got a couple of texts that are talking about the idea of pleasure, being taught the idea of addressing orgasms. Is this something that you discuss in the show?

Sam: It is something that I mention in the show because when I received my sex education training, I think that we, for many years, had no idea why people did it. We knew about babies but beyond that, it was like, "Why would anybody do this?" In my little red book, I learned about so many sex positions, but in the end, I was the most horrified by French kissing. I couldn't imagine why two people would engage in such a thing. What good could possibly come of that?

Alison: Forgive me if I'm getting this wrong. You're Canadian originally?

Sam: Originally, yes.

Alison: And you're US citizen?

Sam: I'm a citizen of US.

Alison: Have you picked up any differences from Canadian sex education versus what happened state side?

Sam: Well, I definitely think-- I think actually Canada as I'm learning more and more about it, is a little bit slowly going down the same path that the United States is on. There's more attention paid to like, "Well, should we have these books in our schools?" There is that kind of conservative movement toward limiting people from actual information about their bodies. As the United States goes, I think Canada is following a little bit. I think it's a little better there but trending weirdly.

Alison: As you were researching your show, because you said you like facts.

Sam: I do.

Alison: Where did you go? What kind of things did you read? What kind of film did you watch?

Sam: Oh my gosh. Really, it was reading, it's just reading material, similar to when I had the television show, we had a large incredibly boisterous, and effective fact-checking department but it really is just like sourcing materials. Reading articles, learning about PCOS, learning about endometriosis. A lot of that research, we were just very familiar with from the show and just continuing down that path.

Alison: Let's talk to Amanda from Manhattan. Hi, Amanda. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Amanda: Good morning, ladies. I guess it's good afternoon now. Thank you so much for having me on. My story is a short one about sex ed. The best of intentions going awry. My mother a very progressive woman, and from a very young age would tell my sister and I almost anything we certainly ever questioned. I'm sure she volunteered a lot of information. I'm talking about from the ages of six and seven. She dutifully got the book for us titled How You Were Born. One of the illustrations in this book was naturally of a sperm cell. It must have been under a magnifying glass in the illustration but I thought it was a frying pan.

Alison: Oh, no.

Amanda: This is at the age of, "You're right, Amanda. Come on. Really?"

Alison: The idea is, Amanda, that you still remember it. That's significant. It's still in your brain, a story you still tell. We're going to have to run around time soon because I want to get Steven from Manhattan in and get a few more questions in for Sam. Steven, go for it.

Steven: Hey, thanks for having me. Fan of the show. Big fan of Samantha Bee.

Sam: Thank you.

Steven: When I was about five, I was snooping around my dad's room and found a Playboy magazine, and leafing through it caused physical reactions.

Sam: Well done.

Steven: I immediately went to my mom. I said, "Hey, why is naked people causing this blood flow to my extremity?" He went straight to the library, brought home a book written for children. I believe it was called How Babies Are Made. It had a lot of very crude drawings of dogs doing it and chickens doing it. The only picture of humans, they were under the sheets so you couldn't see the humans doing it. I did get the image of dogs and chickens and other animals so I only knew about the one position for many many years.

Alison: Chickens. Steven, thank you for calling in. I'm glad we're talking about facts because I did want to ask you this if it came up naturally and it did. Comedians don't have to be 100% fact-checks. They're different from journalists but there's been a lot of conversation lately about-- I know where this is going. Recently, this article about Hasan Minhaj, another Daily Show show his relationship with the truth and his act. We're actually going to talk about it a little more in depth tomorrow with Jesse David Fox.

We're going to talk a little bit about that, about the role of late night show host versus news anchor. From your experience, how are you thinking about what's expected from you?

Sam: I mean, that's just the standard that I set for myself. I think that if I'm going to tell really personal stories, they have to be true. [chuckles] I have to be able to stand in truth because that is where I feel comfortable and I think it's really important. I think it's important if you're telling personal stories for them to be personal stories, [chuckles] not someone else's stories.

Alison: With Strike Force Five, people have been listening to this podcast. You have your own podcast. I want to make sure people know about it. It's really, really good choice words.

Sam: Thank you. Thank you.

Alison: This is Strike Force Five podcast. It's the Late Night Show host, Jimmy Fallon, Colbert, John Oliver, Seth Meyer, Jimmy Kimmel, all very talented, all very white men.

Sam: Yes. Oh, yes.

Alison: Why do you think TV still looks like that?

Sam: I don't know. I feel like, well, maintaining those power structures is important across all of our lives, isn't it? I think there's a tremendous contraction in the world of film and television and the entertainment industry in general. I think that Full Frontal is a casualty of that as many other really great shows have been. It's deeply, deeply unfortunate. I really do miss being able to comment, having a platform with which to comment on the world as it is right now, and especially leading into election season, so it's really unfortunate.

Alison: What's a new story that you would love to talk about right now?

Sam: Well, I would love nothing more than to talk about RFK Jr. and his trajectory. [laughs]

Alison: Oh, boy. Media did not learn their lesson the first time.

Sam: We really did not. We are really cruising for something potentially really devastating, and I can't believe it's happening again.

Alison: Hopefully, we'll get your voice somewhere-

Sam: Hopefully.

Alison: -in 2024. It's needed. My guest has been Sam Bee, you've been my guest as well listeners, thanks so much for calling, and the name of the show is Your Favorite Woman: The Joy of Sex Education. It'll be at BAM this Saturday. Thank you for coming in.

Sam: Thanks so much for having me. This was a pleasure.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.