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Sex education and sexual interest don’t end at a certain age. Melanie Ramey is here not only to debunk myths about sexuality, sexual involvement, and connection later in life but to shed light on sexual information for all ages. This podcast will answer the questions that were never properly answered in health class and address the sex information we need but are too reluctant to discuss. Join Melanie for frank discussions about bodies, sexual health, desire, and age, with honesty and humor.
Welcome to the Sexually Speaking podcast with sex educator and therapist Melanie Ramey. In her inaugural episode, Melanie discusses the origins of sexual understanding and how our thinking about sex evolved through the ages, from wacky theories that were later disproved, to misconceptions about the Puritans, who Melanie says were actually very sexy people. Enjoy our first installment of Melanie's program.
Melanie Ramey: [00:00:33] Hello and welcome to Sexually Speaking. I am Melanie Ramey, and it is a pleasure to greet you today. And I'm glad you joined us because I think that our subject of sexuality and understanding it is very important. In my years as a sex educator and therapist, I have had experience across many venues from medical clinics to working with single moms, to working with staffs in senior citizen communities to really understand and have insight into our sexuality throughout our lives. And we are sexual beings from the day we're born until the day we die, regardless of how old we get to be. And I think that there will be something that you may learn today that you haven't already known before. And I think that's important that we understand about our sexuality as much as possible, because it really makes us more comfortable with ourselves and with our relationships.
Melanie Ramey: [00:01:47] As far as definitions go, I like to use the one of the World Health Organization, and it's really quite broad, but it really tells us that sexuality is the foundation of who we are as human beings. As we have our different podcasts, you'll be able to send in questions, for example, and we'll share some funny stories and about our humanness. And I even have a great recipe for a cake that's reputed to be better than sex. So I'll put that on the Facebook page and you can have access to it and maybe make it, and then you can let us know if it's got the correct name or not. But in any event, as we begin to talk about sexuality and the definition of it, I think the World Health Organization is about the best one that I know. That sexuality is, in every respect, the basis of being human throughout our lives. And it encompasses sex, gender, roles, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction. So sexuality is who we are. Sex is something that we do. So it's really at the core of our being as humans. And it's how that we understand our sexuality and how we manifest it helps us to have a much better understanding of ourselves.
Melanie Ramey: [00:03:29] We have really only understood about human reproduction less than 200 years. And when you think of human history, less than 200 years is simply like the blink of an eye lash. It is really no time at all. I'm sure that in your studies and in your readings and maybe things you've seen on television, you have come across the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Now, Aristotle lived in the three hundreds and is very interesting about Aristotle and his buds. They were very interested in hereditary. They wanted to know how animals could be bred to turn out to be certain kinds of animals they were looking for. But old Aristotle and his friends were clueless when it came to sex. They actually thought everything was in the blood. And so they had the idea that when the male planted his seed at the time of intercourse, that it went into the blood. And then that's how something came out in a few months. So they did not know anything. Well, if we want to think a little bit more about this, let's fast forward a few hundred years to the seventh and eighth century. And here some others came along with equally clueless idea. They had the idea that women had inside of them all a whole bunch of pre-formed humans, and that when the male planted his seed at the time of intercourse, the little humans began to grow and then they popped out. Sometimes the two, most of the time one. And that's how people became people. Well, it's very interesting because this is called the Pre-formation Theory of human existence. It's very interesting because all of this was concocted by men. Now, I could find no place, any writings of women telling about what it felt like to have a bunch of little people jiggling around inside of them and I can't imagine how if you were really a thin person, how you'd even manage to have too many. But nonetheless, that was the belief for a number, number of centuries.
Melanie Ramey: [00:06:07] Well, then it was one person, though, who began to think about this a little more deeply. And this was William Harvey in 1651. He was a physician in England. And he said, this just doesn't seem right to me, because what we keep studying when we're trying to see what how humans come out, we're studying the eggs of birds and frogs. And humans don't lay eggs. They're mammals. So why don't we do the study on some mammals? So what he did was that he put out the word. And when men would go deer hunting they would bring him back the carcasses of the deer that they were dressing. And he wanted the uteruses. So William took the uteruses, and he opened them up. And guess what? There were no little deer on the inside. There were things that looked like eggs. And so he got the idea, of course, then that these were eggs that somehow got fertilized and that people became humans. So this was again the end of the pre-formation idea. And it couldn't have ended soon enough because it was very wrong. But then finally, as we went along, a little bit later, a microbiologist in Holland developed the microscope. And once the microscope was developed, then people began to be able to see cells and begin to open cells and see inside cells and so forth. And then began a more scientific development, the study of the human body and of human cells.
Melanie Ramey: [00:07:56] Well, while all of this was going on scientifically, other things were happening in the society of the time. In fact, in about 1680, along in there, Henry the seventh of England, broke off from the Roman Catholic Church. He did not like what was going on, I think because they probably wouldn't let him divorce his current wife or whatever it was. And so he got mad and said he would have his own church, of which he would be the head. And of course, there was another advantage to Henry, because he liked to look around and see all of the lands and all that the Roman Catholics had. So he just took them too when he started his new church. Now, there was a group of people at the time who didn't like the Roman Catholic Church, and they didn't like Henry's church because they did not think that the king should be head of the church. So this was a group of people known as the Puritans. So the Puritans said, well, we're just going to start our own church and have our own rules. And so they jumped on the boats and sailed away. And they sailed away to the New World. To Massachusetts in Rhode Island, where they established churches and settlements and the eastern part of the United States.
Melanie Ramey: [00:09:19] Now, I think, really, you may have had the wrong idea about the Puritans. Because of the name, I think people have often thought that they were prudish and stodgy and so forth and so on, but that was not true. The Puritans loved sex. They were very passionate people. Now, I got to admit that their clothes were not very sexy, that's for sure. Those big buckles on the shoes, you know, could be used for weapons. But nonetheless, the Puritans were a sexy people. And there's a lot of literature that has the letters and poems that they wrote to each other. Now, there was one thing about the Puritans. They believed that sex was a gift of God, and they saw it as something that was pleasurable and also something, of course, that would produce children. And so they considered this a gift of God. And that was a very different idea than the Roman Catholic Church had had, which it had held with the idea that celibacy and virginity were the best ways of life, and that sex should only be used for procreation, not for pleasure. So, as you can tell, the Puritans were much happier in the New World than they had been in stodgy old England. And it was very, very interesting how they came to have the rules that they lived by. Like some Christian denominations today, the Puritans used the Bible as their sex book, and they went by what they understood the Bible to say about sex and what they understood it to say was the sex should be only between married couples, that it was a sin to masturbate, it was a sin to fornicate, which is sex between unmarried people, and that homosexuality was a sin. But outside of that, in marriage the Puritans were very romantic. And in fact, it's very interesting, they were supposed to have sex as often as one or both partners wanted. And there were some cases where people were actually disciplined by the church because they did not have sexual relations as often as their partner wanted. And this could be both a man or a woman. And so it was really quite a different idea about Puritans, I think, than people have usually had. But in any way, the Puritans went on, and of course, they were very busy developing the country and surviving in the New World and so forth. And so a lot of the scientific discoveries that were being made in England and in, and in Germany, simply did not reach the New World until much later.
Melanie Ramey: [00:12:37] I think that when we think about the history and how we have come to understand sexuality and sex as we do now, that we do have to realize that it was an evolving kind of situation because people did not have access to the kinds of scientific studies and so forth that we have now. And so they had no way of knowing, really, what went on inside of people. Well, and as we go along, historically, we come to 1856. And 1856 is significant because that's when Sigmund Freud was born. Now, Sigmund Freud was born in the Austrian Empire, which is now the Czech Republic. And he went to medical school and became a neurologist. But Sigmund Freud wasn't interested at all in how the brain was structured. What he was interested in was what went on inside the brain. And so he was really the founder of the concept of psychoanalysis. And psychoanalysis is really a therapy that helps to understand people's psychological ills. And although everybody did not agree with Sigmund Freud, he actually spurred the development of the whole science of psychology. And also the very significant thing was that Sigmund Freud was the first person to begin to understand that babies were sexual. He began to explore some of the problems that some of his patients had, and he understood that their problems stemmed back to the very early parts of their life. And he was the first one to even have the idea to study children at all, because to that date, children had just really been sort of ignored. And everybody thought that anything to do with sex only related to adults.
Melanie Ramey: [00:14:48] But Sigmund Freud gave us this very interesting insight into the fact that we are sexual beings from the day we're born, and we'll talk more about that in another podcast. Now then, as he began to talk about children's development and so forth, he began to try to have people remember what they could remember as children and as babies and so forth. Now, then, most of us cannot remember something past when we're three years old. Now, I do know a woman who claims she can remember when she was six months old. I have no idea how she thinks she was six months old, because I don't think she could read. And I don't think there was a calendar in her crib. But nonetheless, I would consider that to be an outlier. So as we think today about some of the things we've learned, how far back can you remember? What is your first memory of your sexuality or anything to do with your sexual development? Think about it and see how far back you can remember. So we're going to conclude today with reminding you to look on the Facebook page for the recipe for the good cake. Also, if you have any questions or comments or let us know what you discover about your memories, you can find us on our Facebook page, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn. Because we'll be there waiting to hear from you.
You've been listening to Sexually Speaking with sex educator and therapist Melanie Ramey. Join Melanie again for more fascinating topics about sexuality. As mentioned, please visit Sexually Speaking with Melanie Ramey on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.