Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / The Re-Civilized Woman: Stephanie Welch on Sex, Society, and Self - Pt 1

Transcript

The Re-Civilized Woman: Stephanie Welch on Sex, Society, and Self - Pt 1 · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  When I think of evolutionary feminism as a term that I've used and it's the idea that
• 0:04
  rather than try to have women make progress by becoming more indistinguishable from modern men,
• 0:13
  we have more to gain by becoming more similar to ancient women.
• 0:19
  Hello friends, welcome back to every day ancestral. I am your host James Berry.
• 0:26
  Today, our guest is Stephanie Welch. I've known Stephanie about three or four years now we met
• 0:31
  through the Westonay Price Foundation. She used to work with Price Pottinger.
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  Stephanie is a self-described, disruptive anthropologist,
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  ancestral health advocate and a pioneer of evolutionary feminism. She personally dedicates
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  her life to exploring the boundaries of relationships and sexuality and using an evolutionary lens
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  to examine and challenge many commonly held beliefs and taboos that prevent us from attaining
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  our full human potential. She brings a highly multidisciplinary approach to promoting human flourishing.
• 1:04
  In this part one of two episodes, Stephanie Welch recounts her struggles with self-esteem
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  and confidence stemming from aesthetic issues like nail biting and how self-care practices
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  transformed her outlook. She highlights how her career is a massage therapist taught her discipline
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  and the impact of de-sexualization and professional settings. She serves insights into her late
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  bloomer experiences including overcoming social struggles and redefining her femininity.
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  And she introduced the idea of ancestral health as a framework for understanding societal mismatches
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  and gender norms and personal relationships. Now remember if you are enjoying everyday ancestral,
• 1:46
  please follow and subscribe to the channel. Share it with your friends and leave a review on the
• 1:52
  platform you're listening or watching us from. Every action you take towards spreading the
• 1:57
  ancestral word helps to let us know you're enjoying what we are doing and encourages us to stay
• 2:03
  on this path. So please enjoy everyday ancestral and our guest, Stephanie Welch, episode one of two.
• 2:12
  Enjoy. Stephanie, so good to see you. Thank you for joining me. Let's start with the question
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  that is on everyone's lips. At the age of 19, you overcame extreme nail biting. How do you do it?
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  It was at the end of high school. It was at the encouragement of my aunt actually. She was a very
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  important person in my life, almost like a second mom to me. This was a habit that plagued me all
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  of my childhood. I don't remember this ever not being an issue. I would just chew them down to
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  nubs, tear shreds. They looked awful. It was a huge embarrassment, right? So it was one of the things
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  that I felt like contributed among other things to my being a little bit of a late bloomer in
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  early life was just how I presented myself. I overcame that and take very good care of them now.
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  That did change when I was a massage therapist. The very first day of massage school, they said
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  fingernails are no longer part of your life. And I was actually a little bit concerned, you know,
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  thought, what have I done? This was something that was so important to me. But I thought, you know,
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  this is a path I want to take in my life. And it's more important to follow this than to hang on
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  to this idea that I need my nails. Did you do anything? Mine said, how did you actually stop
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  fighting your nails? My two daughters do. And so I would genuinely want to learn.
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  I think it's a very tactile habit because for me, the thing that made the biggest difference
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  was just taking care of them. So I had to learn to file them super diligently. And I also,
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  you know, started using nail polish as something to protect them and coat any possible imperfections
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  when I shifted to a more paleo nutrition, the quality of the nails actually improved. But I did
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  take care of them. And really it was being very, very dedicated to filing them very carefully so
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  that there was no rough edges, anything like that because it was the sensation of some imperfection,
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  some roughness, some jagged bit. They just went to my mouth in an attempt to remove that roughness
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  or whatever it was. It was keeping them perfectly cared for, manicured smooth. Like I said,
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  putting a little coat of nail polish anything on there to keep them smooth. And that made a huge
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  difference. If it happened again, I have a terrible time keeping them out of my mouth, but I know
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  I'm dedicated to fixing it as quickly as possible. But now you mentioned that you saw yourself as a
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  late glimmer. You lay with yourself that. What makes you say that? What is a late glimmer in your
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  experience? I was definitely the like, dorky nerdy kid all throughout elementary middle school,
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  high school. I had a terrible time. I didn't believe my dad when I was a kid and he said,
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  one day, you know, you're going to be interested in boys. And I was like, now that's never going to
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  happen, right? Every single year I can remember in middle school and in high school, I would have
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  my big crush of the year. And I would like follow them around. I would try to sit near them all
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  year. And finally, I would try to get up the courage to like ask them out by the end of the year
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  that got rejected every single time. You did the asking out. Nobody ever asked me out.
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  It was a nonstarter. I didn't know how to communicate. I didn't know how to present myself.
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  I may be a little bit autistic. I've never been tested for that, but countless people have
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  assessed that as part of what's contributed to my personality over the years. So I could not
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  get a date for the life of me up through high school until my first year of college.
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  That was the case up into that point. And I overcame quite a few things that I think helped me
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  end up in relationships for about the next decade after that. And then I regressed into some of the
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  things in terms of how I presented myself in the world that I stopped doing some of the things
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  that I learned. I had another period in around 2014, 15, and to 16, where I struggled with that
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  again. I have a lot of familiarity with the common male perspective of rejection and having difficulty
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  finding and getting into relationships. When you at first were feeling rejected and then you
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  said you kind of found some things that you changed before college. You mentioned one of those
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  previously to me was like you got contacts. Was it just aesthetic things or what actually changed?
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  And then what was it later that you realized this isn't working for me anymore? So what did you
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  initially change to kind of find that physical connection with men? And then what did you eventually
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  change to find that connection within yourself? I'm sure that some of it had to do with behavior
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  and personality and trying to learn how to connect with people better. But aesthetics has played a
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  big role for me. Certainly, that has been something where, you know, as I said, as a kid, I didn't
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  know how to present myself. I had some of these things working against me in terms of the very thick
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  glasses. My nails were unpercentible. I didn't know how to present myself in a way that exhibited
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  cues of femininity. I started figuring some of those things out in terms of I got contacts. I
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  stopped biting my nails and I learned a little bit about my hair right around the end of high school
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  just getting into college. So I started putting some of those pieces together and it definitely
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  helped, you know? Obviously, that's not the only factor going on. But that was a puzzle piece
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  that definitely contributed beneficially in my case. As I mentioned, when I got into massage
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  school, the nails, which is the first thing you asked about, that was the first thing to go again.
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  And this was around 2009 to 2010, as I was in school and beginning my massage therapy career.
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  The nails went first and then immediately the jewelry, because if you're massaging somebody,
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  you know, you can't have things on your hands, arms, wrists, that's going to be getting in the way
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  of giving someone a massage. And of course, you don't want anything that's going to dangle and touch
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  the person on the table. You can't have hair falling on them, right? So if you're going to have long
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  hair, you have to wear it back or up all the time if you're working. And it is a lot of work to take
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  care of long hair. I don't know if you've ever had to, you know, do this yourself, James. But
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  it takes a lot of... It's surprising, but I did at one point. It's a lot of time and energy
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  and products, it's styling. And anyway, it's a lot of work. If you're not going to wear it down,
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  it's hard to justify putting them into having long hair. So I started cutting my hair shorter
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  and shorter. And of course, you know, the massage therapy profession, the regulation of it largely
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  exists to legitimize it and to differentiate it from anything that could remotely be misconstrued
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  as prostitution. And so there's so much in it that is oriented around desexualization of both
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  the treatment and in many ways, the therapist. For example, you dress modestly because you don't
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  want to give somebody the wrong impression. That was another thing, you know, my clothing started
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  becoming the most kind of simple, basic, modest, nondescript, boring, completely non-accentuating,
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  kind of clothing. And so every aspect of how I was aesthetically presenting myself started to
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  dissipate from around that time when I started my massage career. And around 2014, I was in the process
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  of transitioning out of a relationship and trying to date again. And I found myself right back
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  in that same position. I was in. Nobody would go out with me. And, you know, I kind of looked in
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  the mirror at one point and I thought, well, I kind of look like a boy at this point. And I just know
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  that that is not helping me. At that point, I'd had relationships for, you know, at least 10 years
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  at that point, I was consistently in long-term relationships. So I knew that it wasn't only
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  personality factors that I had the capability to be in a relationship, but there was something that
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  was not working for me in dating. And that kind of prompted my sort of quest for reclaiming femininity,
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  starting with what are these sort of external indicators of aesthetics and attraction that I can
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  present and that might make a difference. You know, I've realized at that time too that this really
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  aligned with my perspectives on ancestral health because we've talked about many aspects of
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  ancestral health and evolutionary mismatch. And I saw that in many areas of life. Obviously,
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  nutrition is one of them that, you know, we understand that an ancestral perspective on diet is
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  more helpful than much of the conventional guidance that we have had. But I saw the same thing when
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  it came to concepts of masculinity and femininity and relationships. And much like the conventional
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  guidance had shown up in terms of nutrition, which we had to kind of overcome the sort of FDA
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  guidelines and the food pyramid and all that. When I was in college, I was also getting all of this
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  teaching kind of from a gender ideological perspective that diminished the sex differences between
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  men and women. And I sort of got this impression from a variety of gender studies classes and like
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  gender in art that gender was just completely socially constructed and that there's really no
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  difference between men and women except this incidental genitalia differences. And that was just
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  another thing that I started to really question as I was using an evolutionary lens to understand
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  the world that is that really the case and is denying differences in our biology physiology and
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  psychology? Is that helping us in the realm of pursuing human flourishing or is this another area
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  that we really need to consider from an ancestral perspective? So I started to think about that.
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  I think one of the most influential books I read around that time was Sex It Dawn. Is that one
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  are you familiar with? No, I'm not familiar with that one. It's by Chris Ryan and you know it talks about
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  many aspects of sexual dimorphism and how it contributed to different behavior patterns between
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  men and women for our reproductive strategies and how that affects us now. So it's known for
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  providing kind of an evolutionary argument for polyamory, which was something I had actually
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  gravitated towards a long time before I encountered it as an evolutionary perspective. Those
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  things were tying together to me that the ancestral perspective on men and women and masculinity
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  and femininity and relationships and you know how we express ourselves that might be a really key
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  part of another aspect of human flourishing that goes beyond just nutrition and fitness and other
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  aspects of mental health. How would you define femininity? Just like what's kind of your elevator
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  pitch of like someone said what is femininity? It would be exhibiting characteristics that are
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  aligned with our evolutionary expression of female versus male kind of biology, physiology,
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  psychology. I look at it in terms of again how I present myself aesthetically is just one piece of
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  the puzzle. Of course we get a lot of information about one another from visual indicators but also
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  a lot of psychological aspects that women have certain motivations that are influenced by our
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  biology for example towards cooperation and sharing of resources you know as the sex with the
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  much greater obligatory investment in offspring which is referring to kind of the fact that we
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  do the gestation of offspring you know the nine months plus breastfeeding and so on
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  amount of care that is obligatory to the female sex that has also produced related psychological
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  tendencies including the need for cooperation because the risk level is so high given how much
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  energy has to go into every single offspring that we produce if something were to happen to us there's
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  a very very high risk to our children if something happens to us there's a need to have more care
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  takers who are invested in the well-being of our offspring I actually like to think of the female
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  psychology as a little bit more socialist and male psychology as a little bit more capitalist and
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  opportunistic in terms of how we exhibit ourselves another example rather than living with a
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  romantic partner I currently live with a female housemate and we support each other in terms of
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  sharing of resources and responsibilities and things so that's part of that kind of cooperative
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  nature that we have there's also kind of the sense that femininity is more associated with being
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  and masculinity is more associated with doing so there is something that we kind of express in that
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  way in terms of as a woman my presence and the care and nurturing and just qualities that I
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  contribute just from the essence of vitality has a certain value that I bring to the equation
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  and it's beneficial or it can be beneficial to recognize the alignment of that that that is
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  something that we as women from a perspective of femininity contribute kind of the value in our
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  just life and vitality and it's a more masculine approach to be more oriented towards action
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  and outcomes and results and delivering on things you know if we look at those as things that we
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  can be attracted to as well as a woman I'm attracted to men who are very effective and get things
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  done and if we see that as something that we can align toward positively rather than something
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  that we need to fight against then that can be helpful so I would say when I think of evolutionary
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  feminism is a term that I've used and it's the idea that rather than try to have women make progress
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  by becoming more indistinguishable from men from modern men we have more to gain by becoming more
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  similar to ancient women some of that would be the roles that we play in terms of nurturing and
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  domestic contributions and just kind of the complementarity of the male and female ways that we exhibit
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  biologically physiologically socially well I definitely want to explore the difference between
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  kind of femininity in the past versus how we see it play out now but before we fully go there
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  do you think that femininity and masculinity equally share their contrast and what I mean by
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  that is that it seems to me that usually femininity is defined by masculinity but is masculinity
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  defined by femininity because it doesn't seem like it particularly while we've been in such a
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  patriarchal age a lot of times femininity or what it means to be a woman particularly in very
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  specific sections of our society so let's just say like executive world or within entrepreneurship
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  femininity and the power of a woman sometimes seem like they were being defined by how they
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  compared to their male counterparts and almost like the woman had to be like the man in that position
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  I know that you don't look at it like that so I would love you to kind of share what does it mean
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  to be a feminine woman let's just say in an executive or entrepreneurial capacity like how can we
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  define femininity without comparing it to masculinity that's an interesting question and I think
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  if we're talking about a role of CEO and how someone is going to express masculinity or femininity
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  I think there's something somewhat inherent in that type of a role that is a more masculine
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  expression which could be embodied by someone who's either male or female so when I mentioned
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  you know evolutionary feminism in our ancient past there was a huge value that was seen in women
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  as being in the roles of domesticity and child rearing in motherhood and things like that that we've
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  actually devalued in the attempt to pursue kind of independence for women this is where we've done
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  this thing where we decided that the way to make women independent was to model what men have
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  done in terms of going outside the home and getting into the labor force as a way of acquiring
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  money and resources so a CEO role is essentially doing that it's not an aspect of domestic or child
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  rearing contribution it's something external to that and in the process of encouraging women to
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  pursue those kind of roles which is not in itself a bad thing but what it has done is it's actually
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  devalued the contributions of things like domestic labor and child care because those used to at
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  least have some kind of monetary representation when it came to a single income family say where the
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  husband was going out to work outside the home and bring in the money and then pay for the
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  needs and expenses of the wife and children the work that she was putting in was financially
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  represented in that agreement by the fact that he was bringing in the money and paying for expenses
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  but we took this view where we wanted women to become independent again which is in itself a great
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  thing but we chose this model where the only thing that has a monetary value is work outside the
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  home so that's one of the things that I think has actually been somewhat detrimental is that we
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  have devalued all the things that relate to taking care of a domestic environment cooking child care
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  you can get paid for cleaning someone else's house you can get paid for babysitting someone else's
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  children or for cooking someone else food if you're a chef or something like that but we've just
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  sort of eliminated the value of these things in our monetary representation and a friend of mine once
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  said I don't know where this if this is a real statistic or just a generalization but she said you
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  know if you counted all of the contributions that women make inside the home our GDP would double
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  we don't think of it that way what's interesting though is we have a very big movement happening around
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  tradwim if you heard about that so people are looking for more traditional femininity traditional
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  women what do you think that's about you know do you think that in a sense that is an example of like
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  ancestral times rubber banding back to ancestral times and realizing actually we've lost our way
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  and that this is something that's more desirable that do you think that's more that evolutionary
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  feminism and or because some people would argue that it's actually back stepping I don't
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  gather that that's how you would look at it I'm inclined to see it as kind of a rebound that we
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  took a step in a direction that is less akin to our nature and people are saying that it's not
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  always working out for them the way that they might have imagined and they actually do have a
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  desire for a certain degree of greater differentiation between the sexes and for a greater return to
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  certain division of labor that has actually been very effective and you know I'd say somebody
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  who I hear talking about this a lot is Jordan Peterson and he always gives an example a couple
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  of examples one is that in countries with the greatest amount of like sexual equality you find
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  the tendencies between men and women to gravitate towards different types of employment are more
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  gender differentiated than in other places so more women tend to be nurses more men kind of like
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  mechanical and labor pursuits and things like that when given free reign we actually have
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  tendencies to move in these directions it's not necessarily a bad thing to recognize that these
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  are things that we're good at and that we maybe have moved away from and that there's value
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  into coming back towards that so you actually got a master's in art history so clearly that kind of
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  bug towards studying the past was really strong in you but then you quickly switch to a more
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  physical body centered career which is the massage therapy and then of course you've mentioned
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  you know your interest in nutrition as well we're kind of segueing into kind of some of the work
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  you're doing now and what led you to that but like you're delving into exploring what sexuality is
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  and intimacy did you feel like this was missing from current society i've spent most of my life
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  trying to understand human nature and what we need in order to live successful fulfilling lives
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  and in my teens i moved away from religion as a helpful method of guidance for how to figure that out
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  i kind of rejected that and i'd had this sort of a little bit of an evolutionary mind but it came
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  into play and you pointed out yeah around the time when i was completing my master's degree
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  i went to school with actually no idea what i wanted to do and i was just studying interesting
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  things so i had ended up with a master's degree in art history stuff from the past definitely
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  was very interesting to me the catalyst at that point was my second partner that i had long-term
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  partner was somebody who was in very poor health at the time he was not in great health when we met
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  and it got progressively worse over the course of about four years and when he was 28 he was diagnosed
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  with multiple splerosis and that was just halfway through our relationship and i really started
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  to see that things were deteriorating around me so that was a prime example in my close sphere
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  that something was going wrong that people were suffering struggling in a lot of ways and
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  i was convinced and proved to be right that lifestyle factors were playing a major role in his health
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  and it started to become important to me to try to understand what was going wrong and how to
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  to potentially fix it because i didn't want to go down that path so you weren't experiencing any
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  issues around your lifestyle or eating at that time i was not at that time so of course there are
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  many factors going into the equation i would say you know we were eating similar diets at the same
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  time but not identical not certainly quantity was not identical and things like that i just started
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  to get an interest in nutrition as something that seemed to be important and it was about 2008
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  to 2009 i was finishing the master's degree i was working in the museum of fine arts in Boston
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  and i was was in the Egyptian basement and i was cataloging ancient nubian artifacts and things
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  like that and acting as a research assistant helping to set up exhibits and something kind of clicked
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  for me that the work that i was doing there even that was interesting was not that relevant to people's
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  day-to-day lives in terms of the needs that were out there and again the the health things that i
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  was seeing around me and i was trying to decide whether or not i should continue on to a PhD
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  in art history or if i should do something different and things came together with the idea of
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  going to massage school and getting into the health and wellness space as a way to connect with people
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  and really understand what was going wrong like what people were struggling with their with their
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  health i didn't think that becoming a doctor was going to be the best path not only because i'd
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  already been in school for a really long time at that point but i wasn't sure that the traditional
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  medical model was going to be the right answer so i wanted to continue to learn and explore
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  why the body versus new because you even just said i was getting into nutrition so why didn't you
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  then continue into nutrition why did you move towards the body i simultaneously pursued both of
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  them so i had long thought about massage as something that i was interested in or wanted to study
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  i learned to massage myself as a young kid and just feeling you know what was going on in my body
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  so i was kind of attuned to it the same partner who i was with at that time i used to massage him
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  all the time to try to address the symptoms that he was having there were many factors in fact
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  i played an online video game for many years of adolescence in which i played a healer character
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  and you know her special power was to be able to touch people and take away their pain and injuries
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  i saw this and it just kept coming across my awareness as something that was a viable and quick
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  turnaround career path from the art history and it just seemed like something where i could get into
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  the health and wellness space readily with a toolkit that i'd already been wanting to enhance for
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  myself that we give me a lot of access to people and this nutrition is just one piece of the puzzle in
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  my paradigm of re-civilization i've got seven pillars and nutrition is the first one but physical
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  health is the second one and you know mental health and it goes on from there we're going to come
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  back to those for sure i want to talk about that you're saying it was more immediate clearly
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  massage therapy has a much more grounded clear path of like okay i do this and then i can start
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  charging this can immediately incorporate the career versus nutrition is very like how do i
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  make money from this but then you left massage therapy and i know you already shared that part of
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  that was about realizing that you're losing your femininity or at least how you defined femininity
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  at the time and wanting to recapture that and then that took you to Nevada that to me
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  while it might verbally sound like a huge jump when people hear it actually kind of like makes sense
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  in a weird way but i'd love to hear your thoughts on that to me it was a very logical progression
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  all these things you know led from one to the next all different aspects again of trying to
• 30:44
  better understand human nature and what we need for optimal flourishing and success and fulfillment
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  the massage therapy i stuck with that for about seven years i was certainly successful i had
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  a solid schedule i was seeing lots of clients and that worked very well but there were some things
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  was kind of running out of steam you know i sort of felt like i had on the one hand learned
• 31:10
  most of what i needed to know from the work of doing massage i had gotten a good handle of
• 31:17
  you know how i understood nutrition i had gotten a good handle and how i understood by a mechanical
• 31:22
  health from what i learned in that i had my whole phase of shoes or not paleo that was my barefoot
• 31:28
  phase from 2013 to 2016 and that was the first thing that took me for example to the ancestral
• 31:35
  health symposium and promoting those kind of things there was this process where i had gotten
• 31:42
  detached from my sense of femininity and about 2014 to 2016 was when i had started to really put
• 31:50
  some effort into trying to figure that out and it little by little was working on some of those
• 31:57
  aesthetic aspects i started instead of filing my nails completely away even though i was keeping
• 32:04
  them smooth i started to let them grow a little bit more maybe do a subtle french manicure i
• 32:09
  started to let my hair grow out just a little bit more i started on my own trying to regain some of
• 32:17
  those expressions of kind of aesthetic factors 2016 was the first time where i actually managed to
• 32:26
  get a couple dates of people that i was interested in and i felt like i was kind of starting to get
• 32:31
  this i'm starting to figure it out again a little bit and then at the end of 2016 remember i was
• 32:38
  home for Thanksgiving and i was just checking my email and i opened up this newsletter it was from a
• 32:45
  financial guru remit safety i think there was an article in there and it said the women who are
• 32:52
  the best negotiators in the us or something like that these women that they were talking about who
• 32:57
  were these superb negotiators apparently we're working in the legal brothel industry in Nevada
• 33:04
  and i was like oh that's really interesting i thought you know somewhere in the back of my mind i
• 33:09
  knew that there existed a legal sex industry in Nevada but i didn't know anything about it at the
• 33:15
  time it's Nevada one of the only states where it is legal it's the only state and to the extent that
• 33:21
  it's legal it's within extremely limited parameters so 99 percent of what happens out there
• 33:29
  is not legal there's only a tiny little bit that actually follows the very very specific state
• 33:36
  and county laws that actually is legal can you just quickly share those so we're talking about
• 33:42
  legal sex work and so Nevada defines that as what there are certain aspects that are state oriented
• 33:50
  so i think the state health department has certain things to say about it but actually what the
• 33:55
  state does is it gives permission for county-based regulations if they meet certain criteria so only
• 34:04
  counties with a certain maximum population are eligible so for example the cities of Las Vegas and
• 34:13
  Reno are not within legal limits of this you have to actually be outside of the main cities
• 34:20
  it has to be within a licensed establishment i believe you can't create any new licenses at this
• 34:27
  point so there's a limited number of remaining licenses is there any restrictions on like what
• 34:33
  it's defined as or what you can do there's regulations on areas and population but like how do they
• 34:39
  define a legal sexual kind of do they say okay you can go all the way or you can do this that
• 34:44
  or is it like no no you can only go from A to C but you can't go from D to F so the way the laws
• 34:51
  are written other states have laws like this too that define what prostitution is as a crime and
• 34:57
  that list out for example this is not a direct quote of a law but these are kind of how laws are
• 35:02
  written so it's like offering to engage in sexual conduct or sexual contact or sexual intercourse
• 35:09
  these are all like defined in the laws in exchange for compensation or fee committing this constitutes
• 35:16
  like a misdemeanor or blah blah blah whatever the case is and the way that it works in Nevada is
• 35:21
  you have certain conditions that are the exceptions to the law so if you meet these specific criteria
• 35:28
  so it starts with what counties can do it and the counties license these establishments and then
• 35:35
  the individuals who are employed there have to go through the sheriff to get a work card and then
• 35:40
  the business has to be conducted inside the house that it applies to and you have to go basically
• 35:47
  behind closed doors to negotiate with the clients about the activities and money but if you
• 35:54
  meet all of these criteria then you are not breaking the law and you won't be prosecuted for
• 36:00
  engaging in it continue then so you saw this article we're intrigued did you just go out there
• 36:07
  like how did you then embrace this idea going back to the practical considerations I would say that
• 36:14
  the first thing that caught my eye was this idea like wait this article says they make like half a
• 36:20
  million dollars a year well at that point I had so much student debt I was like oh it's not true
• 36:26
  I should say that is extremely a typical that is very uncommon but that caught my eye and then
• 36:33
  that set me into thinking about all these other aspects here I was on this quest for femininity trying
• 36:40
  to understand what it is to be more attractive and seductive and create romantic and sexual
• 36:47
  connections with people and I'm also on this ancestral health path and I'm trying to understand
• 36:54
  is this idea of what I was hearing in college in terms of gender ideology is this idea of you
• 37:01
  know social construction is that another thing that we need to move away from and better understand
• 37:06
  our biological psychological physiological differences which I ultimately decided that really
• 37:12
  is something I think is important for us to acknowledge and become more aligned with if we want
• 37:19
  to have the most success in flourishing in accordance with our nature so there's this ancestral
• 37:25
  health perspective on it that's like here's this environment of sexual commerce where people are
• 37:33
  not consciously exploring these things but like this is kind of the nuts and bolts of like when
• 37:38
  people are exhibiting their most innate desires and drives this is happening in this kind of
• 37:45
  environment and you know it's a big deal and people are strongly motivated and driven to pursue
• 37:50
  this so there's something really significant going on in this environment of sexual commerce so
• 37:58
  I got really curious about that and then I mentioned when it came to the massage therapy that
• 38:04
  part of how it exists is to distinguish it from prostitution and it's great when say you know you're
• 38:12
  doing sports massage you got somebody with a pulled hamstring like you know you're trying to help
• 38:16
  them in a therapeutic way that makes perfect sense but there is always something that I thought
• 38:22
  about this that like the profession talks about itself as being such a holistic practice that the
• 38:28
  massage profession purports to treat people in a way that's very holistic at the same time there's
• 38:35
  this need in everything that we do to sort of pretend that sexuality just does not exist when it
• 38:42
  comes to clients so on the one hand in a practical sense that you have in a massage session there's
• 38:49
  this box in the middle of the person's body that you just can't go near you just have to pretend it
• 38:53
  doesn't exist and if you accidentally end up there it's terrible thing when you were a massage
• 38:59
  therapist did you keep those kind of strict boundaries or did you ever 100% were you working for
• 39:04
  yourself or you're working for someone else a little bit for myself but I worked the majority of
• 39:10
  my work through a couple of different practices one was a physical therapy company one was just a
• 39:14
  group practice of massage therapists then you kind of delved into the sex working and trying that
• 39:22
  did that feel more free because it you weren't boxing or you boxed in a different way that was
• 39:27
  kind of like unexpected there was definitely some freeing aspect of that to be in this very
• 39:34
  a little bit depending on the places that I worked I worked at two different places in Nevada you
• 39:39
  worked at two different places I started it one and it was not as well run as the other the
• 39:45
  second one that I worked that I I felt really did a good job of giving me kind of the independence
• 39:51
  to operate my business essentially to my own freedom and preferences within like I said earlier the
• 39:58
  limits of the legal profession are very narrow right so similarly to the way that I pursued the
• 40:04
  massage therapy career 100% by the books never crossed a boundary and part of the way I just
• 40:11
  conduct myself like nobody even propositioned me so my experience with client services was just
• 40:18
  having a very clear professional demeanor and nobody really ever tried to cross boundaries with me
• 40:24
  but what do you mean by crossing boundaries what's like example of crossing boundaries most people
• 40:29
  ask the question like as a massage therapist do people ask you for more do they ask you for a
• 40:34
  happy ending do they ask you to do sexual things with them that never happened to me in my massage
• 40:40
  and so it's partly just like when I did follow all the rules I had all of these steps in my
• 40:45
  sort of ritual of the process of having sessions with people and just my personal demeanor
• 40:51
  so I didn't run into people propositioning me anyways even in the regular massage profession
• 40:58
  but the constraints of the legal industry in Nevada is very specific again that you can only do it
• 41:04
  in certain places you could say that's restrictive in a way but within those confines I was
• 41:11
  basically free to do things the way that I chose so I did feel that you know I was able to
• 41:17
  to do that and it was one of many aspects of you know I've mentioned a number of the thoughts that
• 41:22
  went into my making that choice but self-determination was another aspect and being able to say you know
• 41:29
  I did choose to abide by all of the guidelines and the the regulations that I had in the
• 41:35
  licensed massage profession but that's not the only way to look at how to operate in the world I
• 41:42
  did feel a desire to not be limited by other people's particular sense of propriety or stigma
• 41:50
  in terms of things that I might explore so that was certainly a liberating aspect of it it was
• 41:57
  many other things too you know I remember from I would say at least when I was a teenager thinking
• 42:02
  about these things and thinking it was very strange to me that prostitution was illegal anyway
• 42:08
  that this was prohibited like why is it between consenting adults that this is something that is
• 42:14
  criminalized and so I always had this mindset towards decriminalization why do you think it's
• 42:20
  criminalized I've actually come across something recently from an evolutionary perspective and I
• 42:28
  believe this was an article I want to say Marty Hazelton was at least one of the authors on this
• 42:35
  that there are strategies in our history in terms of how sexually restrictive different groups
• 42:44
  and cultures are and the degree to which they impose their own norms and behaviors on others
• 42:50
  because it has an evolutionary advantage there's a strong chance that a lot of those tendencies are
• 42:58
  what has contributed to our current standards of norms both around things like prostitution and even
• 43:05
  around reproductive rights or abortion and things like that because if you have a group which
• 43:13
  uses restrictive sexual strategies meaning like monogamy for example as kind of the basis for
• 43:22
  organizing families and resources and childcare if you have a restrictive strategy in place and
• 43:30
  then other people in your community don't follow the same rules it reduces the reproductive
• 43:38
  fitness of the people who do follow the rules so if as promiscuity increases in a group where some
• 43:44
  of the people are following restrictive strategies it creates greater risk for the males to have their
• 43:51
  wives potentially impregnated by other people or for women to lose their access to resources if
• 43:58
  their husband decides to leave them for someone else so there's an evolutionary basis to some of
• 44:05
  the things that we consider morality around these activities so that I thought was really fascinating
• 44:11
  as an actual evolutionary strategy I thought in terms of like should it be criminalized or not
• 44:18
  if I really want to make an argument about that one of the best things to support my argument
• 44:23
  would be to have first-hand experience to draw on so I thought let me check that out and I did
• 44:29
  find that one I really do think that the negative effects on a given individual are much more closely
• 44:36
  tied to the circumstances and the stigma surrounding how they have gotten involved into it or how
• 44:43
  they are remaining involved in it than the nature of the work itself but one of the more important
• 44:50
  things that I found is that what it actually does is let me back up a little bit because
• 44:57
  one of the interesting things that I found is that I had so many people who had come to me and the
• 45:02
  clients are almost exclusively male but they would come and they would say you know what I'm not
• 45:06
  like all the other guys out there I really care about pleasing a woman to all would say the same
• 45:12
  thing and on the one hand that's a very encouraging thought that like there's this you know major
• 45:18
  goal is really that men want to please women but that's kind of bizarre to me that so they're
• 45:23
  paying you to pleasure them or to be have an experience where they climax themselves but then
• 45:30
  they're telling you I'm actually in it for you it doesn't make sense to me it seems counterintuitive
• 45:36
  but here's the thing is like their underlying drive is that they have this desire to please women
• 45:42
  what they have typically found and why they're there is because the women if there are any women
• 45:48
  in their lives the women that they have had experience with don't seem to be particularly
• 45:54
  pleased with them if they were they wouldn't be showing up needing to find somebody to pay for it
• 45:59
  well that thought I have lots of questions so we'll do little bites you're kind of
• 46:04
  continuing that many of them men were actually turning towards legal sex worker prostitution because
• 46:12
  they didn't feel like they were getting the response from the partner that they had that it wasn't
• 46:18
  about oh I want more sex it was more like the reaction to the sex I am getting is not the one
• 46:24
  that I crave or desire so it could be a matter of that they are rejected by women and they had no
• 46:31
  women who are available to them it could be that they are you know in a relationship or married
• 46:37
  but their partner isn't receptive it could be a variety of situations but the takeaway that they
• 46:44
  have from it this is my sort of conjecture my way of making sense of this is that they have the
• 46:50
  impression that most women just don't like sex that much the women are not coming to them for sex
• 46:57
  either because most women just aren't that into sex or the woman that they are specifically with
• 47:03
  isn't that excited by sex part of the problem I think is that they don't look at sexuality and
• 47:11
  sexual performance and things as as skills they tend to think of it as an innate talent that you're
• 47:18
  either good in bed or you're not good in bed and as an ego thing nobody wants to conceive of the
• 47:25
  idea that they might not be good the other interpretation of that again is just that well it
• 47:31
  just seems like most women just don't like sex that much and so their interpretation then is that
• 47:38
  they need to find a woman who likes sex so much that she would do it as a job and so that's who
• 47:43
  you know then they're coming to well thank you so much for joining that was part one episode one of
• 47:50
  two coming up in part two next week Stephanie dives into her work with the legal sex trade using
• 47:58
  it as a lens to explore societal norms around intimacy and autonomy she discusses how evolutionary
• 48:05
  psychology explains patterns and male female dynamics and the stigmas surrounding sexual commerce
• 48:13
  highlights her critique of modern narratives on gender emphasizing the importance of understanding
• 48:19
  evolutionary roles for societal balance and previews deeper discussions on ancestral wisdom
• 48:25
  and modern societal challenges all this in part two and honestly it was her experience in the
• 48:31
  sex trade that I really wanted to capture so I'm so excited for you to hear part two come back
• 48:37
  next week until then stay curious my friends thank you so much for joining me on everyday ancestral
• 48:46
  if you enjoyed this episode hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one you could find the
• 48:51
  show notes links and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com that's e-a-t-p-l-u-c-k dot com and hey if you
• 49:03
  know someone who'd get something out of this share it with them too stay curious live well and keep
• 49:10
  it ancestral