The Skeptical Pervert

We're back, after an extended absence. In November of 2022, Franklin's mom was diagnosed with cancer, so he spant the next year flying back and forth between Portland and Florida to help his dad care for her. Toward the end of her life, she required round-the-clock care, so this podcast ended up being put on hold. She died last December. We have several episodes nearly ready to go, so we're trying to get back on track. In this episode, part 2 of our two-part series on pervertibles, we talk some more about repurposing normal, everyday items for sex. As usual, you can find a transcript for this episode at skepticalpervert.com

It's been a while, but we're back, with a new episode about asexuality! Well, a sort of new episode. This episode was up briefly, but the audio was garbled, so we've fixed the problem and it's back. Anyway, in this episode, we talk about the many flavors of asexuality. We chat with Kitty about the broad range of attitudes, drives, and behaviors that fall under the asexuality spectrum, which, when you get down into the weeds, is really more a three-dimensional graph than anything else. Turns out asexuality is complicated; who knew?

How is sex work like that guy in Mad Max: Fury Road who rode into combat playing a flamethrowing guitar? We talk about that in this episode of The Skeptical Pervert! This episode was delayed by a misadventure with COVID-19 and a hard drive crash. but it takes more than that to keep us down. In this episode, we examine how the concept of 'sex work' varies across different cultures, and along the way talk about colonization. This is even more complicated than the 'what is sex work?' question, not only because every culture and society treats sex work differently, and often says completely different things about sex work altogether, but it's sometimes hard for people from one society even to be able to tell if something in a different society is sex work. We're not professional anthropologists, so we invite you to muddle through this with us, and if you have any comments, let us know! As usual, the transcript can be found at SkepticalPervert.com.

Sex work: Mankind's oldest profession, right? Today we continue our series on sex work by looking at sex work (and some of the common myths and misperceptions about sex work) throughout recorded history. The history of sex as a profession is complex, and many of the things you might believe about it turn out not to have much of a historical basis. (It doesn't help, of course, that much of the language around sex, even in ancient times, is full of innuendo and nudge-nudge-wink-wink humor intended for an audience familiar with understated references, which doesn't age well.) We also suggest that sex work may in fact be older than homo sapiens as a species, and meander into historical accounts of adulterous Popes and people being thrown through windows. You can find a transcript of this episode at skepticalpervert.com

In this episode, we talk about online sex work, the weird OnlyFans bump in the road where they threatened to ban sex workers and then backed down, and we interview Mistress Ivy, one of the top OnlyFans earners, about online sex work. Along the way, we talk about everything from NFTs to the unexpected effects of laws that try to "protect" sex workers but only make their lives worse. Mistress Ivy is a London-based Dominatrix, fetish model, and online performer. You can find her on Twitter and on the Web here.

In this episode, we bring you the first part of a two-part interview with sex educator and sex-positive activist Ms. Ashley, as we talk about the value of evidence-based, scientifically accurate sexual education. Ms. Ashley is a sex educator who teaches an adaptation of the Our Whole Lives curriculum. In part 1 of our interview, we discuss the various types of sex education, what the evidence shows about the effects of fact-based sex ed, and how continuing sex education can help not just students but everyone. You can find Ms. Ashley on Facebook here, here, and here, and on Instagram here.

In this episode, part of our mini-series of sex during a global plague, we take a skeptical look at a paper published in the journal Leisure Sciences called "Less Sex, but More Sexual Diversity: Changes in Sexual Behavior during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic." Along the way, we talk about the null hypothesis, the scientific method, and evaluating a research paper.

So you may have noticed there's a global plague happening right now. In the first part of a series on sex in the time of a pandemic, we look at how the age of COVID can affect people's sex lives.

Good day, and welcome to our show, eh? In this episode, we introduce the Skeptical Pervert podcast. Who are we, and what is this all about? What do we mean when we say we take a rational approach to human sexuality? In this episode, meet your hosts Franklin, Joreth, and Eunice, and find out a little bit about what we're trying to do!