How to talk about your body without shame (w/ Anita Rao)
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You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. And today on the show, we're going to be talking with journalist Anita Rao about how to break taboos when discussing our bodies and our brains. What does it mean to have a relationship with your physical self? And how does that change over time? Here's a clip from Anita's fantastic podcast, Embodied. Even though it's been mine for a couple of decades now, on a lot of levels, I'm still getting to know my body.

I also know that my body is going to keep changing as I age, inside and out, and probably in some ways that I'd never guess. As body and sex positive as I like to think that I am, I'll admit that I'm worried. What will turning 50, 60, 70 do to my sexual desire, my comfort with and confidence in my own appearance, and my ability to welcome new relationships into my life?

Keep your body listening to this show because we're going to be right back with an amazing conversation right after this break. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

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Today, we're talking about bodies and what it means to be a human who navigates the world in a physical form with Anita Rao. Hey, my name is Anita Rao. I am the host of Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. It's a show about sex, relationships and health that takes on taboo topics.

It's always interesting to think about the title of your show, Embodied, but also just how we experience things in our body when you and I are not in the same room, right? You're in a closet in your house. I am in a little pod in my house. So there's something funny about the way that we connect to these days that doesn't actually involve our bodies often.

Oh, it's so true. And it's something I have been thinking about so much. We actually started the show in the pandemic. And it was a moment where I was craving so much connection and the ability to be with people in person and doing this show about the experience of connection and connection with our bodies. But I had to do it all virtually without being with people in person. So I remember the first time we had an embodied event where we were in person with people post-pandemic for the first time. I just felt such a sense of

relief and release to be like, oh, it feels so different to be in conversation about these topics when I can actually see people's faces, when you're having, you're able to like share your physical reaction about something with someone. It's a very, very different experience. How do you...

stay in your body, especially because this is something I always think is really interesting about radio and podcasting is in some ways it's such an intimate medium because we're talking into people's ears. But in other ways, it's also very I wish there was a more positive way of saying the word alienating because we talk to people who we can't see and can't really

whether they are actually listening to us or not. I guess there's an assumption that there's an audience. So how do you stay in your body since I know that's something that you really care about? Yeah, it's definitely a practice and something I have to work really hard to do. My dad is a physician. He is a gastroenterologist. He's a poop doctor. And I grew up in a household where...

Like we could really talk about our bodies and our physical sensations very openly. Like my friends would come over and joke that like they could announce that they were farting at the dinner table. And like it's not an exaggeration. Like if you farted at the dinner table, you owned it. Like that's just something we all do. We all poop. We all fart. And so in some ways I grew up with a very like –

close relationship with my like physical sensations and no shame around like expressing them or talking about them or asking questions about them. And still to this day, like when I'm having like a stomach issue or whatever, I will call my dad immediately be like, here's what it looks like. Here's what my poop looks like. Here's a photograph. Like, so in some ways I have no shame around that kind of thing. So I think that's really helped like me be able to get that

in touch with my physical body in that way. I think I am a very heady person though. So while I can like notice a sensation, a physical sensation, like I'm very attuned to if I'm like hot or cold or feeling uncomfortable,

It is harder for me to like get out of my head and into my body in the ways of meditation or sitting with myself in silence. And so that to me is has been like my work as an adult and a big thing that I try to like take home messages from the show is like figuring out ways to actually integrate meditation.

feelings into my body more instead of just like really living in my head. There are so many great episodes of Embodied, but certainly my favorite episode is one with both of your parents where you interviewed them and you're talking to them about growing up in a biracial family and the ways in which that

Yeah.

I love that reflection. It's very true. But it's so funny because like so many of the things that I have talked about with them on the show, we have never talked about off mic. There was still so much that we didn't talk about. We didn't really talk much about feelings. My mom is British, grew up in like a very British, like zipped up family. My dad is Indian and grew up in a very culturally Indian household where like you don't talk about that kind of stuff. So neither of them really had the language to talk about their feelings. And

And didn't necessarily, like, encourage that in us. So there's so much that I have, like, dug through with them in real time with microphones in front of us that I had never done beforehand. One of the joys of having them on this show is, like, actually, like, empowering myself to have these conversations with them that I don't think I would ever.

have had without a microphone in front of me. If someone is listening to this and they aren't familiar with Embodied, can you give us a little bit of the history of the show? And I know you wrote a really interesting piece about how this, the idea for the show and what it is came out of some of your feelings when you were first kind of moving into the host role on air in a public radio station. I think so much of it was kind of this culmination of like things, realizing there were a lot of things that I was really curious about and excited about.

That I feel like I wasn't I wasn't hearing the conversations about those things in the spaces that I was a part of every single day. And at that time, that space most often was a public radio station based in the South where I was working on a statewide daily talk show. And as a producer, I would always kind of push stories to the forefront that were about like the body and about sexuality and about gender issues.

But that would be like one hour of radio out of the, you know, five hours we did every week out of the however many hours every month. And so it still felt like a very small portion of what we were talking about. On the side, my friend and I started our own radio show at a community radio station. It's a low power radio station that didn't like signal didn't reach very far. And I think that was honestly really liberating was like great. Like unless someone is tuned in to the live stream or within like a 15 mile radius of us right now.

We can kind of say what we want. And it was like a great practice and freedom for me of like learning how to be on a mic and getting more comfortable asking questions and talking about my own feelings without being worried about, you know, what would happen, what would people say, who was going to hear it.

So I was doing that show on the side and then I got the opportunity to host the big radio show that I worked for. And it was really started as an experiment. Like the host of the show was beginning to look toward retirement and wanted to start spending his summers in Buffalo, New York.

And we always joke in public radio, like the summer is when you can kind of try anything because people aren't people aren't listening like as much as other times of year. So like if it was a total flop, like, yeah, we'd get in trouble. But like it would be more OK than if it was a total flop like in October. So we I just was like, these are the things that I would love to talk about. Let's create this like one time four part series about sex relationships and health. And I had such a good time doing it. We got.

really good feedback from, well, we got a lot of feedback, some that was really good, some that was challenging. But in some ways, both of those kinds of feedback empowered me to keep going on. I was really learning my own voice at the time and learning how to sound like myself on the air. And a lot of the negative feedback that we got was about my voice and the actual sound of my voice. And it was really hard. I still have a folder in my inbox that I

I don't look at very often anymore, but like it's where all the negative feedback goes. And it's I think something that happens to a lot of women in journalism, less and less so now that there are so many more kinds of voices on the air, but still in public radio, like there's still a very distinct sound. And I have like a pretty neutral voice. I grew up in the Midwest. I don't really have an accent, but I'm a millennial. So I have some vocal fry and I have some upspeak. And it's those kind of things I would get a lot of feedback about.

The fact that I was talking about things that felt so important and what people were hearing was just the sound of my voice was so maddening to me.

that it kind of like lit a fire under me to keep doing it more and be like, eventually you'll actually listen to the content of the words that I'm saying, not just how I'm saying them. So yeah, I think all of that kind of combined was the personal reasons why I wanted to be on the radio and have these conversations. And then the desire that I had to hear the topics that I cared about, talked about on a bigger scale, set me on the embodied path. Some of the feedback that you got from

negative feedback about your voice and the things you were talking about, you have a folder in your email where you keep negative comments or negative emails that people have sent. I'm curious about that because to me, I would think someone sends something negative, I'm going to delete it. Like I don't want to ever see that again. So tell me about keeping them and having them have a space and what that does for you or why you do that. I'm a perfectionist at my core and I am

am a really self-critical person. But I also really like feedback. And so I think for me, part of keeping it in a folder is like I can notice what it is and I can put it there and I can say, if you need to come back to this at some point for whatever reason, it's there. But right now, you don't actually need to care about this. You don't actually need to focus on it. It's like a way of

keeping myself from myself and protecting myself while being like, if there's ever a universe in which like that could be helpful for you.

It's there. And honestly, when I wrote an essay for the Huffington Post about embodied and I was like, I'm actually glad I have this folder so I can go back and be like, what did people say? Like, what were those wacky things? So I can see my own growth and how I respond to them. But I don't necessarily need to know everything that it says. So I have to just I have to put it somewhere in case I need to go back to it at some point.

I think that probably for a lot of the people listening, whether they're in the United States or not, and certainly whether they work in public media or not,

can relate to the idea of feeling like your voice, whether that is your literal voice or, you know, the more metaphorical voice doesn't fit in with what success is supposed to look like. And I think a lot of people answer that by trying to make themselves match, trying really, really hard to force themselves into the box, to change the way they sound, to change what they talk about. I think it's really interesting that you didn't. And I wonder if you could maybe

As prescriptively as you want, give people who are dealing with that feeling or that situation some advice. Well, to be totally honest, I did try and I failed. Tell me about that. I noticed that if I kind of like set my voice at a in a higher range in my conversation,

Yeah, in my vocal range, I wouldn't have vocal fry. And so I would try to read my intros with that higher voice. Can you give us like, this is you trying to conform and then we'll hear what it is. Oh, it's so cringy listening back. It's so cringy. Okay. So this is like my normal range, I would say. What I tried was to do something like this, which was like, this is embodied. I'm Anita Rao.

Today on the show, we're going to talk about what it's like to be in your body and have conversations about sex, relationships, and health.

How does it feel when you talk like that? Oh, it's so awkward. Like it's so put on. I feel like I sound younger. Like I don't it feels like not me. And I think that's what would happen was like I would do my intros like that. I would ask the first question usually like that. And then as soon as I was in a back and forth with someone, it just slipped back into me.

how I sound. And I would listen back to these recordings I did. And I was like, oh, you can't do it. You can't like ask a question authentically and like vibe with someone while focusing so hard on like putting your voice in that range. And it just it didn't work. And it didn't feel good. Like it felt physically uncomfortable. It felt like I was like trying so hard to focus on that that I couldn't really focus on

being in the moment with someone. And I think to me, like the real joy of this work is when you can get into a flow with someone and when you feel like you're in sync, when you're vibing. So I realized like I can't vibe with people if I'm

forcing myself to talk in this like artificial register. You cannot be a fake version of yourself. You can't conform to like who they want for very long before it's going to fall apart. Yeah, it's going to get like your self is going to catch up with you either through like getting depressed because you don't feel like someone's seeing you authentically or by the other person like figuring you out and realizing that it's you're not who you are saying that you are.

And I think there was a lot of freedom there in feeling like giving myself permission to let go a little bit of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, what I thought I was supposed to sound like. I feel really lucky that the show that I was working on and the host of that show was like very open.

pro-experimentation and was like, great, like keep doing it, keep trying it. People don't like change. And so you just have to like keep going for a while and see what happens. I don't know. There's like a really big exhale that you can experience professionally and personally when you don't feel like you have to like silo parts of yourself from other parts of yourself. And I think embodied

I mean, part of like the name and like all of it is about just like, yeah, let's like stop trying to do that. And let's see what happens when we stop trying to do that. And when we give ourselves permission to integrate more or just like even when things are coming up against each other in ways that are uncomfortable, like that's also OK. And like that's also a part of like what it means to be a human and let yourself like feel that dissonance as well.

We are going to be right back with Anita after this break. So take a moment to allow yourself to feel all the dissonance that you need.

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And we are back. Here's another clip from Anita's podcast, Embodied, where she's talking about her relationship to sex and sexuality when she was growing up. And this comes from an episode where she interviewed her parents about why they never gave her the sex talk. So you've heard of this idea of the sex talk, which is basically when parents tell their kids about sex. You all never had a sex talk with us. Why? Yeah.

That's a great, I like that start on that one. Go for it, dad. Sure. I think it is very much a cultural thing. If I had to learn about sex or porn when I was growing up, it was almost impossible. There was no books that I had access to, even the libraries. We would not get access to that.

None of my parents, none of my family, we would talk about everything else. But the few issues that are generally tabooed, at least in the culture that I was raised, is talking about sex and talking about money. So we carried that same culture over to a large extent.

So part of the reason why there aren't as many conversations about sex or bodies can be because there's these taboos and so people feel a little awkward talking about them. But also sometimes the pushback is maybe more political or ideological. Can you talk about...

How you respond to those? How do you think about opening up space for these conversations and actually having them rather than letting these things go? One of the most interesting things that I have clocked when it comes to the feedback that we get about the show is so on the radio, there are these things called like promos and it's 30 seconds where I'm teasing the show and it airs like multiple times throughout the week in advance of the show.

And the vast, vast majority of pushback and critique we get about the show are to the idea of the thing that we're talking about that someone hears in the promo. Because I'll get I'll get sometimes get these long emails on like a Thursday. And I'm like, it's funny because the show actually hasn't even aired yet. The show is tomorrow. So like, I know you didn't listen to the show. I know you just can't believe we're talking about sex toys on the radio. Like that's that is one of the ones that we got the most comments about there.

There is so much just bristling at the idea of things. And I think we have so little... We have so little shared language to talk about so many of these parts of our experiences that are uncomfortable. And there are these words and phrases that people just...

I don't know, develop such strong negative relationships with, I think, because they bring a lot of shame and discomfort. And so to me, I guess I see a lot of the feedback that we get as being a reflection of like a discomfort that's come up in the listener for whatever reason. The feedback that I think is hardest for me to reconcile with is that

Like if this promo air is in the car when I'm taking my kid to kindergarten, like I don't want to tell them at 730 a.m. about vibrators. If your kid hears that and ask that question, first of all, they're listening way more than I would expect them to be listening to NPR. Yeah. To like, OK, I would love if you would have language where you could respond in an age appropriate way. But if you really feel like you can't, like what are the things that

I need to be keeping in mind about these words that are triggering for people, not because of what they represent necessarily, but just because of like our association with what they represent, maybe. Oh, also, this is another another great episode of Embodied or a thing that has come up a few times on the on the show is you talked about like you just had your laugh. I'm as a comedian, always a connoisseur of laughs. And I know you've talked about like feeling some self-consciousness about the way that you laugh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I really do. That was an interesting reminder where I was like, oh, I thought this was something I was like so totally comfortable with. And like, I love to laugh. So it's not going to stop me from laughing. But it does still like that kind of thing where it's like you're expressing yourself in your most like unbridled, uncontained way. And when people react to that negatively, like that can cut deep. And so it's like a self a thing that I didn't know I was self-conscious about until I really started doing radio and podcasting and then was like, oh, yeah.

Okay. I have some feelings about that I need to work through. You know, you can literally host a show about having like open conversations about your body and bodies and sex and relationships and still have plenty of places where you can

yourself are self-conscious or feel shame. So true. No, so true. It's like it's much easier to hold space for other people and to validate them than it is to do the same with yourself. And especially when you're in these roles of host, like I see myself as like a container for other people at times where like I'm a container for you to share things. But like I would actually have to do the integration work after the fact to make that a part of who I am. And like, do I put the time into doing that every day? Probably not.

We've been talking about like these conversations that that you had on the show about sex and bodies and relationships and self. Obviously, most people listening are not hosting a podcast or a public radio show. But why should people be having more conversations about these topics? Why should this be the kind of thing that you do talk about openly? We need to be having these conversations because we don't like the collective wisdom around these topics is stifling.

so important and is the only way to actually move things forward. I think it's like so interesting when you when I talk to neuroscientists, especially I realize like, oh, we still don't understand so much about the brain. When I talk to other kinds of doctors, like we actually still don't understand so much about the body. And so like, we can't wait for like science and experts to tell us

How we should understand ourselves like we have to do that work ourselves. And I don't think we can do that work alone, especially around these things that make us feel shame and make us feel more alone. So I do feel like you need to have these conversations because you need the wisdom of other people to heal your own pain.

challenges and to make your own self better. And I think the intergenerational aspect too is so important. I feel like that's one thing that I've really learned from talking to my parents and having them on the show is that we need more intergenerational conversations about these topics because we can't, yeah, we're never going to change if we don't recognize the patterns that we've inherited without realizing them and the patterns that we're passing on to other people. And I feel like

We need to start these conversations so we can realize what we're actually trying to talk about beyond the catchphrases and beyond the, I don't know, the words and the terminology that have put us in more isolation from each other because we feel like we don't agree when maybe underneath it there's something that we could find a point of connection on. Something that I've been thinking about in prepping for this interview is having conversations about sex in particular for me.

On the one hand, I want people to not feel shame and I want people to feel like they can talk about whatever they want to talk about. And on the other hand, just for myself, if like sex and desire and all that is discussed so openly and so openly.

you know, every day, does it take away a little bit of what makes it like special and powerful and unique? And I don't know the answer, but that's something that I wonder because to me, part of what feels like special about it is that it is like it's not for everyone like that. My feelings and my desires and my sexual connection, it is really limited. And as a result, that makes it more special to me personally. That is so interesting. Yeah.

I think so much of what I'm trying to get at with talking about sex is like finding ways to reduce the

barriers you have inside yourself. So yeah, like to a degree, like I agree with you that like I, yeah, sharing out in the world, all of our very specific fantasies and all of the like, like details of our specific experiences of pleasure, like maybe that will take away some of the joy of discovery that you could have in a more intimate setting. But I think for me, so much of

the struggles that I see in other people and that I see in myself are like, there's so many roadblocks to even getting to that place where you know what your desires are. And like, that is the work of talking more openly about this as being like, oh yeah, like,

I can't connect to my body and understand my pleasure when I'm so burnt out that I don't even like, I can't even like feel pain or sensation in this part of my hand or like that we're so disconnected from ourselves that building that awareness is like the first step toward accessing more pleasure and accessing more sexual connection. I think if we got to a place where, where everyone like was so much more like in tune and aligned and like actually embodied, like,

Maybe we would need to talk about sex less, but I feel like we're so far from that at this point that I don't know. I imagine it would be a while before we would have that problem. Oh, that's a great answer. I love I love that. And I think it it really reframes it for me in a really interesting way. And and just to say an example, that's kind of the opposite of what I was just saying.

I can think of a really specific moment in my life where I was probably 16, maybe somewhere in my teen years. And I was over at one of my really close female friends' houses. And she had...

Like a box of tampons out. And I was like, oh, that's so disgusting. Oh, my God. Disgusting. And she was like, why is that disgusting? And I was like, I didn't have any language. I was just like, it's just that you're not supposed to have gross. And, you know, obviously part of that was me being an immature teenager. But now I can look back and see like, oh, there's this really like political thing.

cultural force that's like whose body is gross and what parts of our body are gross. And now I look back and I'm like, wow, that was kind of a wild reaction that I had. And yet it felt so normal. What is gross about that? It's totally not gross at all and extremely normal for so much of the population. And it's like you don't even know. You haven't even been able to articulate and understand those internal scripts that

Until you're confronted with them. Like, I remember one of our very earliest episodes was about body hair. And we were talking about, like, why do we shave? Why do we spend, like, thousands of dollars a year on waxing? And this idea that, like...

We feel like hair, body hair on women and femmes is gross and grotesque. And I was like episode, I was noticing, I was like outside with my dog. I think my dog was like playing in the grass and I was sitting down. And I literally like looked down at my legs and was like, ugh, stubble, gross. And I was like, oh my God, like why am I grossed out by my own hair?

leg hair? Like, what is going on? And it's like, you can't even realize that that is a thing until you're like forced to like, you have to confront it. And you have to like, realize what that internal narrative is. And there are so many moments like that, for me in the process of working on these shows all the time that are like forced me to confront those internal narratives. I'm curious, as a person who has interviewed a lot of people about these

Pretty intimate topics and topics that can be pretty taboo. And as we talked about, you know, we don't yet live in this ideal world where people feel like they can just say anything.

I imagine many of your guests are like, thank you so much for giving me the space to talk about these. Have you ever heard from a guest who shared a story on your show who then maybe felt like, oh, wow, I wonder if I was ready to talk about that? There is one moment that comes to mind. And it was it was a show that we did about growing up with a parent who was incarcerated. And we had like a 45 minute, I think, interview with this young woman who

Like I didn't get any signals during the conversation that there was discomfort or there were there was tension that arose. And literally the next day she sent an email and was like, we can't air that conversation. I feel so uncomfortable. I'm not ready for this story to be shared. And it was like a week long process of as a team being like, oh, no, what do we do? Like we thought it was a really beautiful conversation and like.

How do we we want to respect her wishes. We also want to know like what the core of the fear is and like is that core of the fear something that her mind could be changed on or is it that like no this would feel actually like really dangerous. And so we did like a lot of interrogating. We went back and forth with her and ultimately she was like no I won't I don't want to change my mind. I'm not comfortable. We didn't air. We didn't air the conversation. We had to like pivot and do something else.

Sometimes we do like re-air episodes from a few years ago and we always will check back in with people and be like, does this is are there any updates like does this still feel resonant? And sometimes people are like, oh, man, I'm actually not going through that in the same way as I am. But it's OK. Like, I'm still OK with you all sharing it. And I think it's really important to do that work. But it's hard. It's like it's hard to to to be in that role where you want to be. You are empathetic and you don't want to ever share a story that someone feels uncomfortable with.

But you also feel like, oh, but there is I can see the value in being open about this and like other people realizing that there are so many people with this experience that may also feel as alone as you felt. Thinking about these conversations, thinking about these types of ways of opening up in ourselves to think about talking about this, feeling more comfortable, avoiding shame when it comes to body and

relationship and sex and all of the different pieces that you cover and embodied. What are three things that people listening can do to start some of that work in themselves? I mean, I think the first thing is like approaching yourself with genuine curiosity and like giving yourself space and time to really name and get curious about the beliefs that you have about your physical body and

your sexual self and sexual identity, your relationships, and like start there with just like no judgment, just curiosity, like what comes up for me around these things? Because I think there's so much that we don't realize that we're holding on to until we like are able to approach it from a place of curiosity and not judgment. Second, I would say like if there is a conversation you feel moved to have with someone in your life,

make sure you like actually set the table for that conversation. And what I mean is like be very intentional. Don't just like spring up on your partner over dinner that like you feel like your sex life is not how you want it to be. I think it's really these topics are so vulnerable and we can get really defensive around them. So I think it's really important to like

Give people time to prepare for these conversations and like set the table in a very intentional way. So they're like, they're slightly primed. I just listened to this episode of Embodied and I think you'd really like it. And then we should discuss it. Exactly. Exactly. You can always share a resource as a starting point for a conversation. I'm so glad you shared that. A perfect. It's always possible. You always can use a scapegoat, especially a scapegoat who's not even in the same state as you. Exactly. Exactly. So that's number two. Set the table, whether that be like

Intention, sharing a resource. What about in that conversation itself? Because you obviously navigate these all the time with so much nuance. How do you like, what are the actual moves or even emotional moves that can make the talking go better? Like force yourself to sit with discomfort in like a very actionable, tangible way. Like literally count on your fingers to 10 before you even think about anything.

or saying something. Like hold yourself accountable to creating, actually creating space, whether that is pure silence or that's like affirmative listening, nodding, whatever it is. Like I think that that is such an overlooked element of important conversation is like you have to actually stop and slow down and you have to realize that like your pacing is not always someone else's pacing. So like let them have a minute to catch up and adjust and

I think that that like the creating of silence is probably like the best, easiest, attainable thing to do. Well, Anita, this was such a joy. Thank you so much for being on the show and thanks for talking to us. Thank you so much. What a pleasure. Thank you.

That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Anita Rao. She hosts the podcast Embodied from WUNC. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live shows and my speaking events and all sorts of stuff at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to be a better human is put together by a fully corporeal team. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Lainey Lott, Antonio Leigh, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was explicitly fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas. On the PRX side, we've got fully embodied and enlightened audio geniuses Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Maggie Gorville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And

And of course, thanks to you for allowing this show into your ears and into your brain. You make everything possible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to how to be a better human. You can listen on Amazon music or just ask Alexa play how to be a better human on Amazon music. Wherever you are listening, please share this episode with a friend, with a family member, with someone whose body you think would enjoy it. It is a really big way that we get out to new listeners.

This is the final episode of the year, but have no fear. We will be back in 2025 with more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. Have a great, great, great end of the year. And we will see you, hear you, talk to you, be downloaded by you next year. Pick your verb.

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