The Moth Podcast: Joy and Pain
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Welcome to The Moth. I'm Kate Tellers, and this week we'll be exploring joy and pain. A few days ago, we aired an episode of The Moth Radio Hour called Human Plus Nature, where I shared some stories about humans, nature, and human nature. But for this podcast, we're taking a different look at that topic, as we explore the dark side of two of life's most natural joys. Mute for a second, Dad.

sex and laughter. And what happens when something inside you prevents you from experiencing those natural highs? First up, we've got Becky Feldman, who told this story at an LA slam where the theme of the night was gratitude. Here's Becky live at the Moth. Okay, I'm going to get a little sexy.

Throughout my adult life, I have struggled with this condition called vestibulodynia. And I'll just give you a quick refresher. I basically have nerve pain in the entrance to my vagina or the vestibule.

So when I was in college, at the end of college, I started having sex. And while I always could be stimulated clitorally, intercourse itself was always excruciatingly painful. I used to try and just, like, grin and bear it and just push through the pain. But eventually my partner and I would have to stop, and I would be so embarrassed, and I would apologize profusely. And I would always say, like, oh, it's this medication that I'm taking. It's the side effect of it. And...

And emotionally, it just wrecked me. I felt like my body was broken. I felt frigid. And it just got to the point where I gave up. Like, in my early 20s, I stopped dating and I stopped being intimate with people. But then I got to my 30s and I was getting into bed one night and I sleep on the left side of a full-size bed and I noticed the right side of the bed and I was like, oh my God, like, no one's ever been on that side of the bed. Like...

Like a man's head has never lain upon those pillows. And I was just like, am I really going to live the rest of my life this way? So I started seeing all of these specialists who help with female sexual dysfunction. And as I was doing that, I was starting to like kind of panic because I'm neurotic. But also I was like, oh, I'm about to start dating again. I'm about to start being like intimate with people again. And it's just like been so long, like forever.

Do I even remember how to kiss someone? And I was just like, I wish I could just get that first hookup out of the way where I didn't feel any pressure to please another person. So I thought that the thing for me to do in this healing process was to book a night at a random Sheraton and hire a high-class male escort for two hours. Thank you.

So, that's the first time I ever told anyone that and they, okay, anyway.

So in the days leading up to this encounter, I was like freaking out about everything. I was like, what do I wear? And I'm Googling like, what's the best chapstick for kissing? And like, what would my mom think? And one thing that I was worrying about was how I would pay the escort because you do have to pay in all cash, but this is like a high class escort. And I was like, well, how do high class people like give someone cash? Like, do they just like hand them over your cash? So I was just like,

the classy thing for me to do is put all of this cash in a thank you card. So, I found this thank you card that had a phrase on it that I thought would potentially encompass his services. It read, thank you for your awesomeness.

So the night of the encounter, I meet my escort at this bar in the Sheraton. I mean, he's so good looking. Brown hair, trim, great body. Looks like, you know, the male escort version of like Matt Bomer from Magic Mike. And we're sitting at the Sheraton bar and we're talking a little bit. And this guy is just like everyone else in Los Angeles. He wants to be an actor and a singer, but has like a lot of side hustles, including like hustling. And...

Eventually we make our way to my hotel room and at this point I was so anxious that I could have barfed. And we're like continuing this small talk and suddenly I realized like, oh, I think he's like waiting for me to be the one to like initiate this. So I very awkwardly whisper, I want you to kiss me now.

And he smiles so seductively, and we just start going at it, and it's delightful. My body remembers what to do. And after I have two orgasms in at most a minute and a half...

Honestly, it felt like I was in this different reality. I felt like a woman who had a working body, and I felt normal, and I was just elated. So when he asked if I wanted to have sex, I hesitate for a second because I wanted to so bad. But this voice in the back of my head was telling me, "Becky, if you do this, you're going to ruin this night."

So I tell him I can, and instead of blaming it on this, like, non-existent medication, I tell him all about vestibulodynia. And he gets this very inquisitive look on his face, and he grabs his phone, and he starts looking up the pelvic pain in this physiotherapy database, and he's, like, giving me suggestions because, as it turns out, he has another side hustle, and that's being a physical therapy assistant. So...

So, you know, out of all of the partners that I've had, it was this escort, this two-hour-long fake boyfriend who was the one who tried to, like, validate my pain. And because I finally knew what that could feel like, I started dating, like, right after that. So at the end of the night, I handed the escort his thank-you card. And I'm sure when he talks shop with his peers, he's probably like this fucking weirdo giving me a thank-you card. But you know what? He deserved it. Thank you for your awesomeness. Thank you.

That was Becky Feldman. Becky is a Los Angeles-based writer and actor who loves talking about sexy topics, whether it's on her podcast about romance novels called Too Stupid to Live or her solo show Tight, A Night of Painfully Sexy Stories.

And now, from sex to laughter. My sister recently sent me a text in passing about how she was visiting one of her oldest friends and over the course of the evening, she laughed so hard that her rib popped out. As her big sister, I'm arguably the first person to make her laugh. So how do you think I reacted? Exactly.

I made it my mission to make her laugh so hard every time we see each other that her ribs are popping. I even text her follow-ups, hey, how many times did you pop a rib at Christmas? A bar has been set. Fellow big sisters and chronic high achievers, you feel me? And yes, I confirmed. She says the pain is worth it.

All of this talk about human nature has got me thinking of another essential aspect of being human, telling stories. So why not get up on stage at a moth story slam? To find one near you, visit themoth.org slash events. You can also pitch us your story at the Moth Pitch Line. For instructions, go to themoth.org slash pitch line. After the break, a dangerous joke. Be back in a moment.

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Your burger is served. And this is our finest Pepsi Zero Sugar. Its sweet profile perfectly balances the savory notes of your burger. That is one perfect combination. Burgers deserve Pepsi. Welcome back. Our final story is a favorite from the archive. Adrienne McGillis told this at an Asheville Story Slam, where the theme of the night was, appropriately enough, jokers. Here's Adrienne, live at the Moth.

So this is a story about a joke so bad that it was in fact quite dangerous. So my dad loves a good punchline and when I was about 12 and my brother was 8, we were sitting around the kitchen table telling like fourth grade level jokes. And all of a sudden my brother perked up because he had this really great joke he was going to tell.

And he said, "Well, I need a pad of paper." And so my mom got him a piece of paper out of the kitchen junk drawer and a pencil, and he hunched over it and started drawing. And my dad watched this with interest, and my brother spun the paper around, and my dad peered at it. And if you could imagine an eighth grader drawing two stick figures with their hands sticking straight out like this and their legs akimbo.

And between them, these two stick figures, was a hula hoop sized circle and in that side of that circle was another basketball size proportionally to the people. And he said, "What is it?" And my dad looked at it and he said, "I don't know." And my brother said, "It's two men walking abreast." And so, you know, it's got all of the markers there. It's got boobs and badly drawn figures and a pun.

So my dad starts laughing and my brother is just filled with this like little boy glee. And you know how like when you're with your loved ones and you start laughing, you can like feed off of each other. And my dad got laughing so hard he was crying. And all of a sudden he fell out of his chair onto the kitchen floor and he started to turn purple.

And so my mom, who's a nurse, cleared the area and was about to perform CPR. And I ran over to the phone and had dialed 9 and was making ready to dial 1. And he sat up and he looked at all of us in confusion and he said, why am I on the floor? And so my mom calmed everyone down. And she said to him, she said, well, you need to go to the doctor because that's not okay for like a 40-year-old man to faint.

And so the next day or two days later he went to his family practitioner and he told the doctor what had happened. And the doctor looked at my dad and he said, "Well, what was the joke?" So my dad asked for a pad of paper and he told the joke and the doctor looked at him with incredulity

And so my dad starts laughing and remembering his laughter from the night before he gets laughing so hard that he got woozy. And so the doctor said, "Well, we need to run some tests because that's not normal."

So they did some blood work and everything came back normal. And he called my father, who's a college professor, and he said, "We think everything's okay." And so my dad, who was in his lab at the time, told his grad students the whole story. And he got to laughing so hard that he got woozy and had to sit down. And so he called the doctor back and said it happened again.

And so the doctor said, "Well, let's run some more tests." And an MRI or a CT scan or something later, they're pretty sure nothing is wrong, but my dad is just laughing so hard he's cutting off his airway. And so the doctor says, "And just stop telling the joke." And my family were not allowed to tell that joke anymore.

And if there could be a moral to the story, it's that while laughter is the best medicine, sometimes too much of a good thing can kill you. That was Adrienne McGillis. Adrienne is an architect living in Columbia, South Carolina.

Unfortunately, her father, a professor of immunology, passed away on Christmas Day in 2024. When we emailed Adrienne to let her know that the story would be re-airing, she told us that her dad got a huge kick out of the story. The summer it was first aired, he would pull out his cell phone and play it for anyone who sat next to him for too long. He just loved that it made people laugh. Adrienne hopes that you'll get a chuckle out of it, too.

That brings us to the end of our episode. Thanks so much for joining us. From all of us here at The Moth, have a story-worthy week. Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at The Moth, and co-author of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story. Her writing has been featured in Mick Sweeney's and The New Yorker.

This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Ginesse, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, and Patricia Oreña. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers.

For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.