Gonads: Sex Ed

Before we get started, just a note, this episode contains some strong language, as well as content that may not be suitable or at least ready for younger ears. It is an episode about sex ed. Okay, thanks. Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC.

Hey, I'm Molly Webster. This is Gonads episode six, and it's our last episode. I'm going to go cry after this is done, but first, I want to share with you this really fun thing that Team Gonads did in May, and that is we did a live event on sex ed. If you've been listening to the series, we have been looking at the biology of biological sex and sex determination, and one of the things we kept thinking was, man, now that we know how complicated it is, how do we teach this stuff, and how do we teach this stuff in a climate where people are really polarized and divided?

In thinking about all this, sex ed, it just felt like more than a radio story. If you bring up sex ed with anybody, they have stories, they get excited, they get animated, and it really felt like something that would live quite beautifully in a live space, in a live event, almost like recreate the sex ed classes we all may or may not have gone through. So today, we'll be bringing you clips of that show, and it starts with Chad Abumrad. Hello, hello.

How are you guys doing? All right. So, so, so excited you're here. So, I guess I should just say, welcome to Radio Lab's Sex Ed.

That is a sentence I never thought I would say. In the 15 years I've been doing the show, I never anticipated this moment where I'd be on stage saying that to a live group of humans. But, you know, here we are. And I grew up in Tennessee, so I actually didn't have sex ed.

So, I am looking forward to learning something tonight. Please, welcome to the stage, Radio Lab's Molly Webster. Hello. Hello, hello, hello.

Whew. Well. This kind of feels like my sex ed class, which is like nerve-wracking, and you're not sure how it's going to go. So, to start the night, we are going to go down south.

Mississippi, 2011. The state passes a law that places some restrictions on sex ed, notably when it comes to talking about condoms. The law specifically says no instruction or demonstration on the application of a condom. So, that's Stanford Johnson.

He is a sex educator in Mississippi. And so, on the one hand, you might think, no big deal, right? It's just a piece of plastic. Kids can figure out how to use it.

We don't have to show them everything. But Stanford says it's not really that easy. I will tell you a story from when I was a high school teacher here in Mississippi Delta. The school brought in a guest, certified sex educator, to talk to the kids about sex.

He said this quote, because it has stuck with me for 15 years now. He said, when you make a condom, in the time it takes you to drive it from the factory to the store, it loses half of its effectiveness. And then he said that, in the time it takes you to drive it from the store to your house, it loses another half of its effectiveness. And in the time it takes you to take it out of the wrapper and actually put it on, it loses another half of its effectiveness.

And I was thinking, that's not how bath works. So Stanford and all of his teacher friends were like, well, if this is what kids are being told, maybe we really do need to do those condom demonstrations. But the question is, how? So for Stanford, this all came to a head at a teacher training that he was at.

So the teacher training was to train teachers in how to teach sex ed. And as part of the training, one of the teachers was up in front of the group, and she was supposed to explain how to use a condom, because this is a caveat of the law. You can talk about a condom, but you can't explain or show how to use one. And so this teacher, she was a hand talker.

So as she talked, she used to pay him on the line. And as she was reading the steps, she couldn't help but actually pay him on the condom. And somebody from the state department was saying, I don't think she should do that. I really don't think she should do that.

Like, that's a condom demonstration. Talking with her hands was now illegal. And it got to the point where, as she's saying the steps, she actually has her hands behind her back. And like, that's how she's doing the steps.

So we thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world. It's hilarious, yes. But it's also like, we need to tell these kids about condoms. We don't really know how to do it.

And so thinking about this, the next day, Sanford came up with something that I think might be one of my most favorite things on the internet. Hi, my name is Sanford Johnson. I'm doing a sex ed training right now. It's kind of this like grainy, in the shadows iPhone video in which Sanford Johnson is standing there with one foot barefoot while he's holding a white tube sock and a sneaker.

And remember, according to Mississippi law, he's not allowed to perform an actual condom demonstration with a condom. So what he does is he holds up his tube sock to the camera and he says, I want to teach kids how to fit on a sock. If you're going to be engaged in a sock ed team, whether you're wearing an athletic shoe or whether you're using a dress shoe, it doesn't matter to me as long as your foot is for tape. I want to make sure that you have my sock.

So I'm putting it on the sock. What I do, when I start with the sock, I want to pinch out the air on the tip of the sock because I want to make sure that there's room for my toes when I'm engaged in a shoe activity. Then I take the sock and I put it on top of my foot and all I do is just roll it down. Just roll it down.

Now some people stop right here and just only put that sock on halfway. That's not how you do it. You want to take the sock and you want to roll it all the way down your foot. You want to roll it all the way down your foot and then you can put it inside your shoe and then you're ready to engage in a shoe activity.

Now when I'm done. This video lives on our website. You should absolutely go watch it when you're done with this episode. This video is delightful, but it served a larger purpose for us, which is that it reminded us there are a lot of different ways to have conversations about sex and the body.

And we thought, okay, what if for our live show, we try to reframe the conversations happening around sex ed? What if we use metaphor and euphemism and comedy, maybe even a little meditation as a way to navigate all the stuff swirling around sex ed, whether that's a law in Mississippi or just the general awkwardness that comes with this topic. So to do this, one thing Sanford and sex educators from all across the country told us was that a key part of a sex ed classroom was a question box where students could drop in anonymous questions and then the teachers would pull them out and answer them to try and facilitate discussion. So we thought, what if we make our own question box and try and answer the questions with this reframing?

So we gathered questions from listeners, Reddit, Sanford, fifth graders. It's in no way comprehensive, but we gave it a try. To kick us off, here's Majel Connery singing the first question. This is just her, a mic, and a vocoder.

What are periods? What are periods? Oh, what are periods? Oh, what?

Oh, what are periods? Thank you. It's really an unbelievable pain. It feels like someone's shoving a knife up inside me and then turning it slowly, but with no rhythm that I can track.

So I can never quite get my head on top of it. I'm predicting it. It feels like I'm like in hell and I can't move. That's Cinda Agha.

She's 24, a filmmaker, and she's talking about what she goes through every month when she gets her period. Now, periods. Sort of a weird topic. Still a little taboo.

Hush hush. I say paternalism, maybe. It is a little hard, though. Roughly half the planet doesn't get them.

And even if you do, every period is so different. They're kind of hard to talk about. But Cinda has seemingly found a new language for discussing her period, and it's with kind of an unexpected companion. Some background.

So I have endometriosis, which is a reproductive illness that one in 10 American women have, where your endometrium, which is usually the lining of your uterus that gets shed during your period, starts growing in all these places it's not supposed to. So on your organs and your intestines. Well, you actually start growing outside your uterus? That's what endometriosis is.

So each month, and I had no idea about this. I feel embarrassed as a 35-year-old woman to have gotten to this point and not known this. But each month, your body tries to push out all that extra tissue that's in places, and it can't. It can't get rid of it.

And so it's very painful. And you can take birth control to help eliminate the pain, which Cinda did for many years, but then she started getting depressions and all these complications, and so she had to stop. And as soon as she did, the pain came rushing back. I got my first period off of birth control.

I was maybe 22 years old. And it hit me when I was at the airport in Casablanca in Morocco alone. I was traveling back from Liberia. She'd been making a documentary for the BBC and was about to fly home.

And I got my period, and I had like 30 minutes until I was supposed to board my flight to JFK to get back to the United States. And all of a sudden, I couldn't move. She said she just sort of froze in place in front of the food court. And Janet ended up coming up and meeting me like, are you okay in Arabic?

And I was like, I can't speak French. I don't speak Arabic. And I was like, are you okay in French? And I responded.

I was like, I don't have to speak period in French. He was very helpful, but the pain was so bad, she was just like, I have to call somebody. And I still had Wi-Fi. I said I called my dad.

Which I was kind of surprised about. Like, I'm pretty close to my dad, but he's not the period guy. Maybe we're old-fashioned. I don't know.

So we called them both into the studio to talk about it. All right. Okay, so I'm Gould Aga. I'm a professor.

I'm her dad. I asked him, what was it like to get that phone call? You know, it was hard for me because I couldn't do anything. Because I'm helpless, and all you can do is sit there and feel the emotions, but not be able to, you know.

I feel really bad for you. Gould said that on that call, while Cinda was in the Casablanca airport, and he was all the way in Illinois, he just started trying to do everything. Close your eyes. Take your breath.

What are you feeling? Meanwhile, Cinda is literally. I sound like I'm having a baby. She was crying and moaning.

Gould's trying to make her feel better. He's tossing out all these ideas, but the pain's still really bad. And then my dad said, think about a color. Like, think about the color red.

And then she'll get to a different color in her brain. In that moment, Cinda became 11 years old again. It was her first period, and the pain was terrible. I was laying in bed.

My mom couldn't be there. And she was, you know, almost always there. She had to be at work. I was having really bad cramps.

So it was my dad and my uncle leaning over me, trying to help me. I was just, like, mortified. I was in such a thing, like, really worried about it. And...

So my dad turned on, you're going to chance. And he's burning some incense and serving over my head. And he was saying, like, just track the smoke with your eyes. And just follow it, follow it.

Okay. Imagine you are the smoke, and you're just floating. And I'm completely committed to it. I was like, I have a smoke.

And then he was like, okay, close your eyes. Imagine a color. What color are you seeing? I was like, red.

I was like, that's not a dream. Cinda realized in that moment she could actually see the pain. It was a thing that had a shape to it that she could identify. And then he was like, okay.

And now try to change it into a different color with your brain. I was like, that's good for me. I see red. I push you, I push you.

Cinda found herself thinking back to that moment, and once again talking to her dad and trying to transform the color of the pain. I remember standing on the little staircase that leads up to the plane. And I was like gripping onto the bar, trying not to fall over. I'm like gritting my teeth, just like clenching my jaw.

And I was just like, okay, the color red. Okay, I see it. Yeah, I see it. All right.

Okay, come on. Turn into something else. Pink, maybe. Okay, all right.

Boom. And she says, standing there, about to board the seven-hour flight. It actually helped. And I was still in really bad pain.

But mentally, I can stay here. Sit inside of it. It's like a silly non-judgmental. Yeah.

It's like, okay, I'm feeling pain. Let's really feel it. It's very Sufi, because in Sufi tradition and Sindi culture... And so Sinda and her dad are from southern Pakistan.

You don't, like, try to avoid suffering. Instead, you just try to express it. Like, when someone dies, there's really professional wailers that you hire to come wail and cry with you, right? Or maybe you don't hate them.

You were telling me about that. Yeah, that is common. Yeah, yeah. And you know, any of the time somebody comes visiting, the whole story is repeated, and then the professional wailers are...

Crying. It's their job to, like, express suffering. And it's to get you to cry being. It's not to be the crier if you can't cry.

It's actually to get you to keep going through it. Yes. To keep crying. To keep pushing through the feeling.

Right. So sit with the pain. That's point number one. And point number two is pain to me seems pretty dark.

I don't know about you, but I don't know if I would actually think about a color. But Sinda said, for her family, it's not that surprising because her dad's, like, a little obsessed with color. You know, you would always wear, like, post-it note, hot pink, bright orange, like purple. You're wearing purple right now.

Is that culture or is that just you not caring? I don't think you're unusual. Red is more common. And Sinda's laughing here, but if she was being honest, she would say that when she was a kid, this color palette...

In the end, color was a place that she and her dad were able to meet. And then just keep meeting. Because the month after Morocco, another period, more pain, she called her dad. The next month, another period, more pain, she called her dad.

And then the next month... Yeah. What are you saying and doing those moments? So the first thing I'm trying to do is just to get her to be in the color rather than sort of trying to switch it right away.

You know, being able to feel it. Yeah, I'll close my eyes and I'll focus in on where the pain is and what it feels like. And I let it just kind of shoot up into my brain. And it feels like kind of like if you watched like a watercolor kind of like wash across the cake, you know?

And everything's red all of a sudden. And the first thing I think is, aha, yeah, that's it. Like, I've identified it. Try to be one with it and see what you see, what you feel.

And then I try to just kind of shift the color and start like, you know, changing the tint a little bit into orange. And it's like mixing with red and then pushing it all the way to something different like a pink, you know? It's like a wash and it gets like thicker and thicker. And then all of a sudden the weight's coming in a different color.

At this point in the live show, we put onto the screen these amazing images. They're hyper-saturated, poppy, surreal, and they're made by Cinda. If you want to see them, you can go to radiolab.org slash gonads and check them out. Cinda's inspiration for these photographs is what she sees in her mind's eye when she's in incredible pain.

And she's able to capture the images right now. them down as her dad is coaching her through these color meditations and he just makes me feel it sounds weird because he's very loving but he like makes me feel how little i'm at it and it calls me down and it's gone and it continues and it's gone and waves come and waves go and it's a sea of green and imagine you're one of those bubbles just fronts it pains one of those bubbles it will increase and then it will just pop it will be gone and then more waves will come that's cool that was good that was actually realistic you still call him i always call him and how do you like schedule that like for you i would almost be like oh crap is today the day she's gonna call and like how do i book my afternoon it was yeah it's my god that was filmmaker cinda aga and her father ghoul aga we'll be back with the radio lab live sex ed the final episode in the gonads series here on gonads we've been talking about the biology of sex and sex determination and i can't help but think that the one place this all plays out is dating um anna do you remember our summer single oh my god i do mine was very short yours lasted like a week mine is still going this is why we're excited that our good friends over at death sex and money led by anna sale are taking on the topic of dating they're following a group of listeners for the entire summer they're variety of ages some are straight some are gay um some are online dating some aren't and they're all over the country through these stories they'll be thinking about all sorts of things that come up in dating who are you attracted to and why like when it becomes intimate like what kind of intimacy feels right and all of these things feel like right now they're like very much up for grabs and also something a lot of us are talking about abstractly so listen you can check out hot dates because it's dating in the summertime on the death sex and money podcast feed go get it hi this is emily in louisville kentucky radio lab presents donance is supported in part by science sandbox a simon's foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science additional support for radio lab is provided by the alfred pislone foundation each story you hear on money starts with a question what happens if we refund tariffs why are groceries so expensive at npr we stand for your right to be curious because the forces shaping our world can be hard to seek follow npr's money wherever you get your podcast and start seeing how the economy really works this is gonads episode six this is our live show about sex set so far we've talked about condom demos without any condoms periods we even went on to talk about the deeply important topic of what happens to all the bananas after condom banana demos but we ultimately went on to discuss a question that is one of the primary reasons um i wanted to do the show anything anything anything is there anything off limits what you'll find is you can get together a room full of people who you think have the same opinion on what should be taught in sex ed in schools but once you boil it down to the nitty-gritty of the fine details you realize everybody draws a line somewhere and to wrestle with that line drawing we got together a panel of really smart people who think about this and we presented them with real-world scenarios we ran into while recording this issue and we tried to have them do something where they like waved flags for when they thought a line was crossed or for when they supported the line that was being drawn i'm not sure if the flag thing worked but you may hear reference to it and so i would like to welcome to the stage i'm gonna move maybe i shouldn't i'm gonna stand here and then they'll come then i'll go um yay uh education historian and author of the sex ed book too hot to handle john zimmerman muslim youth activist dahlia and sex educator erika hart um okay so the first one december 1st 1994 surgeon general jocelyn elders who was appointed by bill clinton condone the idea of teaching school children to masturbate as a way of avoiding the spread of aids she was asked by dr rob clark a psychologist at a un aids conference about the prospects of a more explicit discussion of promotion of masturbation as a means to limit the spread of the virus and she began her reply by saying she's a very strong advocate of sex ed in schools at an early age and and quote as per your specific request in regard to masturbation i think that is something that is part of human sexuality and something that should be taught um i think masturbation is really really important i think that people should learn about it and i feel like it should be talked like taught um as part of like a sex ed curriculum but for this reason absolutely not um i think like she really like politicizes that reason and it was used not for her own sexual benefits but as like a way to um downplay aids and be like this is terrible i don't want anyone to know about this or deal with this so like i don't this seems like a red flag to me interesting john this episode was completely miscast and misunderstood it was an invented media non-event um it was cast it was reported as doors and elders saying that she thought that in schools teachers should teach students how to masturbate that is not what she was saying uh what she was saying was masturbation is a part of human sexuality and people should be informed about that that's very different than saying we're going to teach them how to masturbate which i would then post to the panel like would you go as far as doing how to in a sex ed class how to masturbate or do you just introduce it as an idea we're talking about now in k-12 schools well we can talk about what if there's a yes in there i'd want to know what age if there's a no i'm curious if that's age related you can't necessarily teach how to and i think also speaking to what you said about jocelyn elders this is another example of how race and sexuality gets completed or not necessarily completed but definitely comes to the table with that jocelyn elders was like literally essentially lost her career talking about this which shows the anti-black origins of ever talking about sex and how our bodies are used and on the lines but when we start talking about ways that we can actually own them it's now a problem um and the other part of that is that you can't necessarily teach someone how to have how to masturbate hashtag cosmo you can't really do that um because everybody has a different body right and everybody's bodies function differently um like for example me i'm a breast cancer survivor i don't have nipples so to be like oh you can stimulate your nipples that would be triggering for me because i don't have that body part but if you just say touch your body in the ways that feel good for you like i told my fifth graders yesterday um and they're like what like what does that mean like any part of your body you can touch and that is called masturbation right so now they know what it means and there's not this weird thing around this am i doing it right miss which i get questions about all the time like am i doing it right i'm like does it feel good to you then yes this has been a hugely contested question across american history um and uh masturbation specifically specifically and if you if you don't want to read about masturbation don't study sex education because you find it's the most contested subject and the reason is it's explicitly and only about pleasure right it's not about procreation and even though i expect that many people in this audience think that sex is for pleasure it's important to understand that there are you know some 330 million americans and not all of them agree with that perhaps right some of them think that it's only reserved for heterosexual marriage and it's only reserved for procreation and that's why they have discussions masturbation because masturbation by definition doesn't fit that framework i was gonna say what's the role that um like religion has because masturbation is so tightly tied to you know i was raised catholic definite no-no right um it's so tightly tied to that i wonder how do you respect uh sort of like religious space when you want to introduce a topic like masturbation yeah like i mean like a lot of my students will say things like well for example god is a man and i don't necessarily agree with that but i have to kind of hold space for that that's their understanding of it so same thing with masturbation where it's like i can't masturbate because i'm christian or i'm catholic i'm like okay so you will not masturbate then but i still have to talk about masturbation as you are in my sex ed class and that's a topic i'm going to talk about and not necessarily not talk about because there's some students who are religious it's like you don't have to opt into everything that i'm saying it's just knowledge for you so you don't go around shaming yourself or someone else for engaging in such behavior it's really it's really difficult you know i mean there's shockingly little sex ed in this country and there are a lot of reasons for that but one reason is that we differ so fundamentally about sex and sexuality you know i mean we're here in lower manhattan this is not a representative audience okay yeah and and sex is tied to use a loaded word our most intimate ideas of ourselves as human beings um uh and any of those are faith inflected you know um and so if you look at uh western democracies what you find is people that uh object to sex education now they often cluster among two groups white evangelical christians and also recent immigrants especially immigrants from uh muslim in the world you know i mean these are often groups that agree about nothing else um but in the uk and sweden and canada united states every account of their shared objections every newspaper account must use the headline strange bedfellows yeah i've never seen a single journalistic account because it works perfectly right i mean these are people that basically agree about nothing including immigration right uh but this is hard and it could be hard for people like myself on the left because we say we don't have diversity but we also want this thing called comprehensive sex education how do you square that circle now you're not in too many thoughts um yeah so i was raised muslim and i think it's not uh don't teach your kids about sex it's more of an unspoken heterosexual we use it to procreate type way and i hate like feeding into this like american narrative like muslims are like all straight cis heterosexuals but i'm like i'm like we're not um but also that's how a lot of us were raised unfortunately and like with new generations coming in we're like all queer and whatnot but um but it's hard to navigate sex in general let alone masturbation because there is a stigma that's tied not just within the religion but within our own communities depending on where we're coming from okay so this one uh happened at a charter school rockland california so a kindergarten class a student can bring in a book and the book can be read during story time uh and so for one of the weeks a transgender student brought in a book called i am jazz which is a book about a transgender kid uh the teacher read the book in class um and then there was a really interesting reaction from the parents like uh holy crap we were not prepared for this our kids came home with very confused and tons of questions and i thought this was an interesting one because a lot of what we've been talking about is sort of formalized sex ed and this is informal sex ed uh i don't necessarily think that it's informal per se i mean it's just about a person's experience and what cis normativity does which is meaning like the world is very cis gender dominant um it's like this is weird now we're gonna maybe we should have a letter about this um you don't need a letter about talking about george washington or the civil war or the vietnam war or world war ii so why is it that when you're talking about a trans person that now you need to be warned that you're going to talk about this now what about you i know we were talking backstage you said you could go either way on this one yeah because my only thing my only qualm is like cis people don't know how to facilitate discussions about gender with their kids obviously especially if you're kindergarten and you're asking like my boy my girl like these questions that you said that this year to ask so i wish that the parents knew about it just to be able to facilitate a conversation um so it would have been okay like i'm kind of like a letter would have been better because that way they would have been able to know about this beforehand so like the kid wouldn't come in at like 4 p.m be like i don't know what's happening this is what happened at school today so if they knew about it beforehand i feel like it could have been a more productive conversation yeah johnny thoughts look it's really hard i share the sentiments that you guys heard about cis normativity and i'm deeply supportive of trans rights but i'm also supportive of public schools and i understand that they are under threat all right and i think that there's a really delicate balance here if you want people to support your public schools you can't at the same time transmit the message that somehow they just didn't get this thing this sex thing right and we the school have to intervene there is a fear and i think in what you're saying there's a centering of institutions in this country it's like the institution needs to be upheld like oh don't mess up the school the school is gonna fall apart and if the school falls apart then we have nothing um rather than centering the most marginalized um and i think to think that a school is gonna fall apart but not trans folks and non-binary people and genderqueer people and to not think about their experience is is a mindfuck for lack of better words i think what is missing in sex education is talking about intersectionality which is not just a celebration of various identities but talking about the ways in which people are impacted by systems of oppression so actually talking about that when you talk about masturbation is this really something that someone has access to if you're talking about putting on a condom why is it that that mississippi the poorest country in this country has no cannot talk about condoms like that is really a function of race in class right and really being mindful of that really bringing that into your classrooms and people don't necessarily do that they're like oh let's just talk about sex and let's just have this conversation and not be mindful of the things in which like people are also bringing to the table yeah john i agree with all that i just think that a true and honest intersectional approach would also acknowledge that a lot of recent immigrants to this country find a lot of these themes anathema don't think they belong to public school believe that they're familial and religious matters not school matters i'm not saying i agree with them i am saying though that an honest intersectional approach would have to acknowledge that would have to take account of the fact that we are a diverse society and many of our recent immigrants not all but many find these themes inappropriate for a public school but that's the opposite of what i said i said it matters that you actually talk about where people are from and that you actually get interested if someone is dealing with being documented they probably don't want to talk about masturbation as the conversation went on i wouldn't say that we ever actually came to a consensus on any single scenario and you can feel it's thorny but what was brought into the room were all of the different things that go into thinking about how lines are drawn in sex ed so race immigration class maturity body type age we went on to discuss um other scenarios some of my favorites are introducing bondage to ninth graders or live bdsm demonstrations attendees were warned five because yes that has actually happened on a college campus somewhere um we aren't able to play all those for you here on this podcast but what we are going to do is play you the final segment of the night which is um a batch of questions from what is sort of the quintessential sex ed target population oh lightning round okay so i'll just do a little thing so last week we heard about the sex educator who made an amazing discovery this educator is teaching a workshop at a middle school in southern Maine, and they were talking to the school nurse, and as they talked, they saw that on the nurse's desk there was this, like, overflowing envelope. And she asked what it was. And it turns out the nurse said, oh, those are my fifth-graders' sex ed questions.

And so we obviously were like, we want those. Thank you very much for telling us this story. And they're pretty great. And so we're coming to the end of the night, and like all sex ed classes, we've only gotten through about five questions.

And so one of the things Sanford tells me that they do is we'll do a lightning round where they just try and, like, whip out answers. So to help us out, from The Tonight Show and Comedy Central, please welcome our very own self-proclaimed sex ed expert, Joe Firestone. Hi! Should we stand at this between us, or come and stand far apart, or closer together?

I think we should stand here. Okay. So, Joe, what made you our sex expert? Well, you asked, and I just said it, and I actually probably have had sex less than everybody here.

But you felt ready to answer these questions. I mean, I figured, at that level, I think I could handle it. I just want to say I'm very nervous about the speed. Okay.

Okay. It is a lightning round. I understand. It's raining outside.

Oh, okay. I'm ready. Okay. There's no ticking.

Unless you want the No, I do not want to. Ready? Yeah. Does rest milk taste like carton milk?

No. I take long hot tubs. Does that mean I won't make a lot of sperm? What?

Um, I warm it in mine. Right, of course. Um, no. You don't have so much sperm.

Yeah. Yeah, don't worry about it. Okay. How long do you have sex for?

A few to 20. The time of this lightning round? Yeah, yeah. Um, I heard my friend lives off donuts in McDonald's.

What do I do? A passionate love. How big can a penis get? Huge.

Why do we do this anyway? Because we don't want to do math. My mom buys me books. It answers my questions.

I still want to ask her my questions, but I don't want her to get mad. What should I do? Oh, definitely take her out to lunch. Other girls have developed, but I haven't.

Can I use a cream? I mean, I think creams are always good. Especially in winter. I would say go for it.

A little coconut butter? Yeah, it's going to happen eventually. Just keep, you know, moisturize it. What happens when two sperm reach an egg at the same time?

Twins. Can people have sex with objects? Yeah. How does a girl not get the sperms?

She shews away. Why do kids start to like each other in fifth grade? It's exposure. It's just exposure.

Just a round of money. Yeah, not for you to start. It's horrible. Psychological.

Homeschool them. How does a penis fit in a vagina? It's really hard, but there's a lot of maneuvering, and I would say use each other. When girls are still young, does milk come out of their breasts when they squash them?

I guess it depends how hard you squash them. Why do girls have the baby and feed it and help make it and the boys don't have to do anything but help make it? It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up.

Yeah. I don't understand. I wonder, can I keep that one? Yeah.

This is a rain related one. Can a penis shrink or grow because of the weather? Yeah. Anyone?

Yes. Yes. I have a crush on someone. How do I tell her?

Oh, obviously, hidden messages. Definitely don't be direct. I would say gifts. I had the white clear oily substance on my underwear.

What should I do? Oh, laundry. Why, when a boy sees a girl he likes, his penis hardens and sticks up? It's the eternal question.

And I guess the answer is, the penis is guiding you towards what you should be doing, which is your homework. Another show! Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to Go Nans the series.

See you soon. This is Jen Frawlick calling from Berkeley, California. Radiolab was created by Jad Abimrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Maria Matassar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bartomeo, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, David Gabel, Bethel Hufti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kieltee, Robert Crowich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Marianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliayi, Carter Hodge, and Lisa Yeager. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.

We'll be right back.