Enrique Cerna Interviews UW Sexologist Pepper Schwartz

This is a transcript of an interview with Pepper Schwartz on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on August 1, 2008

EC:Doctor Pepper Schwartz, welcome. Good to have you here.

PS: Thank you for having me. I am really pleased to be here.

EC: So, lets talk about sex. How did you become a sexologist.

PS: You want the long form or the short form.

EC: Well…

PS: Okay.

EC: Give me the short form, we only have a half hour.

PS: Uh, Ok. Short form, is uh, two things. One when I was eleven. Um, my mother gave me a sex education book. I know its like a calling. I swear this is a true story. Put it in the linen closet. Said it was there for me to take a look at. One night my, one day, my girlfriend Francy came over crying and I asked what was the matter and she said her mom had caught her touching herself and that, told her that she was evil and going to hell. And I said, hey Francy, you are not going to hell, come to the linen closet. Showed her the book that said masturbation was normal and she felt a whole lot better. And then I went to my mom and I say “hey we’ve saved Francy, we can save everyone.” And my mother and, my mother was of a way different generation. I was a last and a late child. She called up seven or eight of my girlfriends mothers and invited them over to this little sex education group we had in our basement.

EC: Really.

PS: This was 1956, I mean this was they weren’t doing this. You know.

EC: Whoa way, yes right, way ahead of time.

PS: So then that means I came from an unusually open home. When I went to Yale many years later as a graduate student, it was the women’s revolution, it was the civil rights resurgence, um, it was a time of kind of, you know, examining the status quo and questioning it, and one of the things that we were all were questioning was what they said about female sexuality and at that point all I could say is not to there is to which is not a very powerful response. So I decided to change what I was in which was the sociology of law and study the sociology of sexuality and intimacy in relationships which didn’t exist at that time so we kinda had to invent ourselves.

EC: When you started then down this road, this path, as a sociologist, how has that evolved. What was it like as you began that journey as to how it is now?

PS: Well, you have to remember that I was at the leading edge of the baby boom, so when I went to graduate school there was still a lot of discrimination against women. I mean we were basically told to expect less. And, I mean, there were the kind of things you hear like, you know, why are you taking a fellowship when, you know, it could go to somebody that is going to have to support the family all that kind of crude was going on. And, uh, you know when you go to something like the family or sexuality that was lower class yet. Um. But I was very fortunate because it was just the moment in academia where discrimination was being actually not just at looked at but reversed. And so there were a lot of departments that were looking for women. When I went the University of Washington, I and one other women that was hired at the same time in 1972, were the first tenured slots that department had ever offered to women. So you know a lot of, a lot of things are timing. If I had been a few years older it would have been a much more frustrating experience. Um, I sort of had to sort of create myself because I was in areas that weren’t classically sociological. But I was very luck in my department. Even though my department was much more quantitative and traditional than I was, they supported me and they tenured me and I’ve been very luck in all those things.

EC: Did you have any trouble getting taken seriously with what your area of study was all about?

PS: Oh sure. And, you know, when I was younger I had a chip on the shoulder that would dead knock the ceiling, you know what I mean. I am not the sweetheart that you see today. (both laugh) I was angry and, and you know, and it did, and one reason I wanted to get a PHD basically in anything, was to be taken seriously. [Laughs] You know here I am this small person, and, uh, female, and at the beginning of a sea change, and uh, yeah, I used to use quite a few expletives which I don’t use any more.

EC: You’ve calmed down?

PS: Yeah.

EC: Yeah.

PS: Well I think what most people want is to be taken seriously and given a little respect. If you don’t do that, they get angry and they act out their worst selves. If you feel like you are accomplishing your dream and people are, are listening to you and you are being taken seriously and you have some dignity, you have no reason to be angry.

EC: What really helped you, I guess, open the door, as far as, what you are talking about because, eventually it is not just sex you are talking about, you’re talking about relationships,

PS: Absolutely.

EC: And how people get along and love each other or not love each other. And not only that, you are not only dealing with a heterosexual lifestyle you were talking about also lesbians and homosexuals as far as how they were dealing with it as well.

PS: Absolutely, I’ve always been a civil libertarian. I’ve always believed in equal rights for everyone in every category. And it infuriated me that this was a taboo and stigmatized group, and also I thought they were analytically interesting group. To compare and contrast with everybody else. I wasn’t afraid to go up against the prejudices that existed because that’s just in my bones and in my blood. You name the issue. How did I get some of that? I worked my butt off. And I worked it off in traditional and untraditional ways. I really was a work-aholic, I have trouble not being one today. I’d have trouble not being classified as that. if you need a grant to be respected, so I have grants, if you needed to be in a certain journal to be respected, you know I got in that journal. I wrote books, I wrote articles, I worked, I worked hard. I think a lot of people who are minorities, whether it’s a sexual minority, racial minority, religious minority, or disadvantaged gender situation, try and double the output so that they cant be accused of X, Y, or Z.

EC: As you have been doing all of this, do you still find that we’re hung up about sex?

PS: I literally just finished writing a paper called Why We’re Still Scared about Sex. I did. One is, we still have religious dictums, that make us feel guilty and confused. We don’t have really good sex education across the country. We’re still ambivalent about women’s sexuality and what they should be or not. Women still get called slut, there’s still double standards out there. now you are allowed to have sex, but still the conditions are different. So I think that’s still going on. I think we’ve been scared because of disease and we haven’t really all had that dialogue about good AIDS education, that isn’t trying to scare the hell out of us. I think there is a number of reasons as well. But, we’re a schizophrenic nation about sex, we have the most explicit soap operas, I mean things you can’t even think of, you know, Brad are you sleeping with brother’s sister’s cousin, or she really your long lost mother. I mean you know, whatever. We have every product sold by sex. We have sexual products that for erectile dysfunction, prime time tv. All of that, and you still cant advertise condoms on network television. They will not accept those ads. We still tell people in these abstinence only courses across the county, that premarital virginity is normative in the United States, when of course half of them have had sex by age 16 and 80% of them will have had sex by age 19. we literally in two parallel groups, not connecting the dots and making it rational. So I think our fears really allow us to not create the sexually safe and happy nation. Yes we’re much different than we used to be, but on the other hand so much more opportunity to doing healthy socially physically and mentally unhealthy activities without the grounding we need to handle them, that for most parents, that are kind of in shock. At a political level, we have all these cross cutting policies that we need to make in analytically reasonable way for the way people live now.

EC: It seems like technology is playing a role to some degree. You have the internet, I get countless emails everyday about Viagra and other things. Penis enlargement.

PS: We all get the penis enlargement emails. Really I don’t have one, I don’t want a bigger one if I had one.

EC: About a year ago, you wrote a book called Prime. That came out, adventures and advice about sex love in the central years. As I read this, I think the thing that hit me the most about it that you were so open about your own life. And of the things you were going through. Was a period not long where you ended your second marriage, you were going back into the dating scene, and handling all that. how tough was it for you in making that journey back into that world, but also, to then write about it in a book and to be so open about it.

PS: I’m an open person, I mean that’s my nature. So I was going with my nature. I was married for 23 years I was going back into the dating environment, cuz you know I love being in love, I love sex, i don’t want to sit there and become a knitting expert, you want to have a life. What really shocked me was how worried everyone I knew was for me. Oh there’s nobody out there, its going to be terrible. Friends saying I couldn’t dare show my body at this age. Lots of negative fearful kinds of things. But I didn’t feel negative or fearful. I actually didn’t doubt that I wouldn’t have other people in my life again. And I went out there and it wasn’t easy but it was also exciting and growth producing. I had several people that I fell in love with, I had to take a couple emotional hits, but you know that’s life. And It felt like all of these women that are my close friends, who had said, that’s it, I’m done, there’s too much pain out there and not enough pleasure and I wont find love again and I’m not worthy anymore, but this has to be answered, this has to be contradicted. So I felt the only way I could do that, is showing that I was having a hell of a good time, yes there are some really unhappy experiences, but no they didn’t crush me, we can be resilient. Not everybody has to love you, I guess maybe my personality is I’d rather have some love for a while, then kind of a medium life forever. So it was sort of trying to demythologize that the end of passion and love hits somewhere in the mid-50‘s, and also give people some tools and inspiration to say, there’s a lot more life out there, even though the culture sort of treated older men and women as ridiculous when they’re sexual, we treat ourselves that way you know. So that’s what that was about.

EC: It seems to me that you’re also talking to women, but I get the feeling that if men were to read this, and really examine their own lives, particularly if they find themselves in a point of their live, or middle age, where they are single, they could learn a lot about relationships, how these things change.

PS: You know that’s interesting, I hadn’t thought about male readers, I was writing very much to women, a lot of men have read this book and said that they really thought men should read this book because they learned a sort of unfiltered workings of a mature women’s mind and what was going on for me, when they might have not thought that, and try to think about the things women want, so they can become better lovers and better people in their relationships. I think a lot of men, err not because they have bad intentions but because women haven’t told them what they need, when they’re happy, they haven’t been straight with them. They’re worried about the feign male ego and they get so worried that they don’t give enough feedback for men to be all that they can be. We all need to be a lot more honest with each other, and that doesn’t mean being cruel, quite the contrary. I think people need input, feedback, they need compliments when they’ve done the right thing. I sometimes, its very funny to me, as you’ve said earlier, homosexual couples as well as heterosexual couples, one of the things that happens between lesbians is they sort of feel that the other women is a women, she should know what pleases her. It doesn’t work any better with people of the same sex than with the opposite sex. You got to talk and tell each other.

EC: For women I guess, what, is there a bigger difference between what men and women have to deal with, particularly where you are in this book, you’re getting back into the dating scene. How do you handle that?

PS: I think both men and women, when they’ve been married for a long time and haven’t dated are very insecure. And I think older men have some new issues they have to deal with. Usually they’re not the sexual athletes they used to be; men’s equipment start to fail them a little bit as they get older and they have to deal with that. even to the extent of lets say, I have to wait a few days or maybe I need some medication, or my appetite wasn’t what it was. Yes I want to make love sometimes, but not like some marathon, it doesn’t even interest me anymore. And so, they have that, we all don’t look as good as we did at 30, we may look great for our age, lets be serious here right? So enter into the dating scene with some disadvantages, but some extraordinary advantages. We know ourselves, we’ve made something of our lives, we’ve been resilient, we may have children that we’re proud of, a community we relate to. I think honestly, I think it was easier dating at 55 than it was at 25. because I knew and liked myself more and I could deal with rejection more.

EC: How did it work out for you? Its been over a year since this book has come out. You’ve been out there searching for love in places. Where are you at now?

PS: When I wrote this book, I said that’s it, when this is published, I will never get another date. Its over, and sure enough I published this thing which has received very nice reception. Much nicer than I thought, I was worried what my colleagues would say, I wrote the president of the University and said I want you to know what’s coming and he was very reassuring and nice. My chairman in my department was nice. A lot of things that I thought would happen to me didn’t, including the fact that I proved to still be dateable. I met a man online, I’ve been seeing him for a couple years. He read about 2 paragraphs in the book, he said, that’s it, I’m not reading anymore of it. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

EC: And your children?

PS: My children, my daughter said she couldn’t wait to read it, and then she didn’t really have to courage to it. My son assured me he would never read it but he was proud of me doing it.

EC: Did you feel like you had to be completely open about your own experience, particularly with the fact you’ve been giving advice for all these years, and yet, here you’re opening yourself up, but that’s the approach you had to take with it.

PS: First of all, experts aren’t gods. Much as we pretend to do so, someone asks us to answer a question in a soundbyte. The fact is, we don’t run our lives in some perfect way. I certainly was helped by information, in terms of how I make judgments and how I see people, but I cant predict they’re reactions to me, or always make the best possible emotional reaction to them. So I think I did bring a lot of advice in that book, it doesn’t require perfection I think to do that. I felt I had to be very honest about everything I included. I didn’t include everything in that book. I did not include for example some famous people I’ve known and been with. I didn’t want to look like this was some kiss and tell weird thing and or I always find it too self complimentary to say those things, when I read them in other books.And so I didn’t touch anybody that would be identifiable in anyway. And I was very brief about my marriages. Because I do like and are friends with my ex-husbands. They didn’t sign up to be in this and I didn’t say that much about them. And other people were anonymous. So I was dead honest about things that concerned me.

EC: What would you like to see change regarding the whole look at relationships and sex as we are here in this new century. With the challenges of dealing with relationships and also communicable diseases and informing our kids with the technology and all of these things.

PS: I’d like there to be good places for life long education about sexuality and intimacy. Because how much of our jobs, our country, ourselves, are ruined, because we don’t know ourselves and we cant manage an intimate relationship. How much has the economy suffered because of divorce or sexual harassment or other violent interpersonal acts. I think of what I study is, is that at the center of human existence and human happiness, and I would sure like to be given a bigger place in people’s preparation for life.

EC: I think that’s something that’s so vital because in many ways, we have such difficulty just getting along with one another, understanding each other. So its almost a basic thing that would help us to something that’s more intimate.

PS: Oh I totally agree, when we had Seeds for Compassion here a little while ago, Desmond Tutou was here and the Dali Lama was here, I know people wanted to see them, but I also think they were reaching out for a sense of emotional connection. Of trying to find those best things in themselves, rather than their weakest things. And I think this goes into relationships as well. We would like to talk about them, we would like support to them, we would like to have a calmer, peaceful, more loving world. It starts with ourselves. It starts with how we feel about ourselves, and the next place it is, is with our children and the people we love and our desire to be loved. We want to be loved so much that when we feel unloved, that’s often when we do our nastiest stuff.

EC: As we have seen in California, same sex marriages are now being allowed. I don’t know if this is the beginning of what’s going to start around the country. Obviously there are many people that don’t agree with us. How do you see the state of marriage changing now?

PS: Well first of all, for me, I’m a love junky, so I watch anybody, I watch those 2 people, elderly female couple, the first one to register in San Francisco, they’re in their 80’s, they’re the first to declare their love for each other; how can you not love that? how can you not feel moved, just 2 people in love. What’s wrong with that. and I think a lot more people are feeling that way. We have come from thinking of homosexuality as a dangerous illness to giving them legal rights within the systems of many states and legal marriage is in least 2 now. That’s a long way and relatively few years in human existence. I find that very warming. I think marriage is becoming much more a choice along a number of choices. We have people, the mean age of marriage is 24-25 for people who have a high school education, its 27-28 for people who have a college education. There’s quite a bit of co-habitation going on. We now have domestic partnerships, I think marriage is becoming, its still important, but its becoming a choice. Many gay people who are thrilled to have their civil rights and get married, there’s many other gay people saying, what are you crazy? We have a good thing going here. All those legal entanglements, think about it! And we have that in the heterosexual population as well. I think in my mother’s and father’s generation, older people would have never thought of living together. That would’ve been wrong, it would’ve been embarrassing, it would’ve hurt their reputation. But older people are saying, I don’t want the legal entanglement either. You keep your place and I’ll keep my place. Or lets live together or lets do X, so I think we are segmenting out into the things that we want, by identifying who we are personally. Now I know this really upsets some people. particularly, and I understand why it concerns people of reproductive age, or have kids already, I can get pretty conservative there, I would like people to make firmly good commitments to each other and their children during this time, to raise them to adulthood if they can. If they can do it, I’m not for people staying in loveless painful marriages, but if I can make them loving, and companionate, and constructive relationships, that would be the best thing. I think it’s all a little bit different when you’re talking about kids, but I also believe that there’s a lot of different ways to go. Some people think that marriage is desperately endangered, and there’s a very strong conversation among sociologists, psychologists, family therapists, public opinion, about the state of marriage, but I think we’re doing pretty well, and I believe that, there’s never one thing that fits all people. And I think people operate better if they have a social construction, whether its co-habitation, domestic partnership, marriage, whatever, that suits them, that they can live well within and do their best in. and I like the idea that we have that conversation with our self and about what we’re going to do.

EC: Prime: adventures and advice in sex love in the central years has come out on paperback now.

PS: Just this month.

EC: Alright, well thank you for your time, thank you for your insight, thank you for being so open, I appreciate it very much.

PS: Thank you I enjoyed this immensely.