Interview with Wednesday Martin

**Zachary Karabell** (0:06)
What Could Go Right? Today, I'm going to speak with Wednesday Martin, who has written a compelling, provocative new book called Untrue, Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust and Infidelity is Wrong, and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. It is a wide-ranging gallop through the contemporary culture of women, their desire, and the emerging worlds of consensual and not always consensual non-monogamy. These are questions, of course, all of us have been asking for decades, centuries, eons, but Wednesday Martin brings to it the research of the present, the anthropology, the science, what different species do and how they do it. She is previously the author of the best-selling and controversial Primates of Park Avenue about the lives of the rich and not-so-famous on Park Avenue, and she's written widely for a whole bunch of publications, as well as having a Ph.D. from Yale University, and she lives in New York with her husband and their two sons. I urge all of you to take a look at the book. It really is both new and old simultaneously as a way of examining and re-examining how women relate to their own sexuality, how our culture relates to female sexuality, and whether or not attitudes in this area, which remain more puritan and than not are at last beginning to change. So with that, let's go to our conversation with Wednesday.
Wednesday Martin, talking about sex and desire, fidelity, and the lack thereof. And let's just start with an open question of what led you to write a book about female desire, infidelity, or fidelity, depending on how you look at it. How did Untrue come to be?

**Wednesday Martin** (2:04)
I have a lot of friends who are anthropologists and primatologists. And I knew when I was writing my last book, Primates of Park Avenue, from looking at motherhood through those lenses, that mothers of most species are highly sexual, and that we're really unusual as a species and as a culture, that we kind of separate sex and motherhood the way that we do. So that was like kind of the first clue that something interesting and worth pushing out was there. And as I continued to read, I just thought, wow, there's so much that primatologists and anthropologists and sex researchers are discovering about female sexuality that's surprising to me. It'll be surprising to other people too. And I just thought it would be fun to kind of cross this less available knowledge over to women and men too, who could really benefit from it. So that's what I usually try to do. I try to cross over social science and make it fun. And it's hard to go wrong with sex.

**Zachary Karabell** (3:10)
It is hard to go wrong with sex.

**Wednesday Martin** (3:12)
Well, some people go wrong with sex.

**Zachary Karabell** (3:14)
Well, at least it's hard to go wrong with sex as a commercial product.

**Wednesday Martin** (3:17)
As a topic, right. You know, it's something that everybody has a strong opinion about or an investment in. And even if people are shy and don't want to talk about it, I think they really do need permission to feel a little less weird about sex, which is one of my goals with this book. So much of what we've told women about their sexual selves is just untrue. And I think that crossing over this social science can help women be a little more comfortable in their skin, so at least that's my hope.

**Zachary Karabell** (3:50)
One question that I thought of when I was reading this and thinking about it was, haven't we been having these conversations in one form or another at least since the 1970s and in other ways at least since Kinsey and birth control and the invention of the pill? How come this seems simultaneously so new, right? So many people who you interviewed talked about having not thought about many of these questions or talked to anyone about them, and yet it seems culturally, at least in the West, I mean, this is, this would be a, I doubt you're going to have the Saudi rights to this book being published anytime soon. Although, maybe, like, why does this seem both familiar and yet new?

**Wednesday Martin** (4:35)
One of the reasons I think that it seems new is that there have been so many rollbacks again and again. One of the most interesting things about writing this book was talking to women who identified as second way of feminists. Some of these women in their 60s now or their 70s, who would say to me, I don't know what happened, but women younger than me are so much more uptight about sex or about sexual exclusivity than my generation was. We tend to think of progress as this arrow, right? Shooting forward through empty space. And the reality is it's not that way at all.