Elizabeth Banks says your sex education isn’t over

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Emily Cox: Hi, I'm Emily, an editor here at Audible, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be speaking to Elizabeth Banks about her newest project. Her podcast, aptly titled My Body, My Podcast, is truly groundbreaking and just so refreshing for how candidly it covers topics that are traditionally shrouded in cultural baggage. I can't wait to dig into this with her. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Banks: Hey, thanks for having me.

EC: Just to start off from the top, when did you first start thinking about doing a podcast? Where did this idea come from?

EB: I actually got approached about doing a podcast after I was a guest on a couple podcasts. Someone put it in my ear like, "You're a really good guest, you're kind of good at podcasting. Maybe you should have your own podcast." And I was like, "Ha, ha. That's crazy." Also I thought to myself, I don't want to have to call up everybody I've ever known and ask them, "Hey, will you be on my podcast?" Which by the way, I get those calls all the time. And I just thought, "Ugh." If I were going to do it, I wanted to make sure that it was something that was focused, that it was meaningful to me and that I felt like was maybe a way of creating a, frankly, better world in general. How do I put my brand of humor and feminism [in it]? How do I put those things together into content that I feel is interesting and maybe a little more personal than I've ever been before? That's what I feel like podcasts are mostly about. 

"We all want to connect in a deep way with other human beings, and we do value being able to be vulnerable with other human beings."

One of the reasons I feel like someone said I was a good podcast guest is because I'm pretty open about my personal life when I'm on a podcast. It's just such a personal venture. Generally you're in people's ear as they're walking or driving. It's like you're having a conversation and they're part of it as well. The audience is part of the conversation. And so to me, it just felt like this was such an interesting opportunity to have these sort of girlfriend experience conversations that I've been having my whole life with a larger group of listeners.

EC: You have traditionally worked in a visual medium. Do you think that there's something freeing about stripping away the visual in working with the podcast?

EB: Well, it's always nice when you can wear pajamas to work and not do your hair. I really enjoyed that part of it. Just that the artifice is gone. It's just about storytelling. It's bare bones, you've got to make people pay attention through the storytelling alone. You can't fall back on visuals or really any other tricks. It's just about, are people going to be interested in what you have to say and how you're going to say it? Can you be compelling just by telling a story? And to me, the other thing I would like to say about podcasting generally is one of the reasons I take a lot of pride in my craft as a storyteller, as an actor, is that the medium is as old as human beings are. We told stories around the fire when we were cave people.

This is how we communicate to our children. How we tell stories to each other has been a part of human history, and actors are the latest incarnation of that storytelling tradition. I have always taken a lot of pride in being a storyteller and being somebody who entertains people, educates people, and moves people. To me, that's the best version of everything. It's like, I learned a little, I cried a little, I laughed a little, I was entertained. That is the combo that I'm always going for in all of my work, no matter what I do.

EC: The subject matter you tackle certainly taps into all three of those things. It's moving, entertaining, it's educational, big time. There's a common thread in your podcast that's really, maybe it's "having a body and being a sexual being." But you cover a lot in there. There's body image, shame, periods, gender, pleasure, and I really loved the sex talk. How did you align on these six topics?

EB: This project came about because I thought of a bunch of stories from my own life that really shaped me as a woman and as a parent, as a mother. One of the common threads of so many of those stories were these really important moments that happen to all of us. We all have a first time, a first period. We all have a first sexual experience. It can literally just be first kiss, first touch, first orgasm, any of those things, we all have those firsts. 

And it's funny, actors, we go to sets and we meet new people constantly in our job, right? You're always sitting down with a new group of people. We collaborate deeply with people too, we have to get to know people fast. When I first started out, somebody said to me on a set, this woman that I met, who, by the way, I never saw again, said to me, "Listen, what are your piss, shit, vomit stories?" And I was like, "What?" And she's like, "This is how we go, we get deep and we go fast and everybody has these stories. So what are your piss, shit, and vomit stories?" I couldn't believe it. And then you start talking. You're like, here's my stories, and then you hear their stories and like, "These are amazing stories." And by the way, they always make you laugh because they show people vulnerable, which is how we all want to be. We all want to connect in a deep way with other human beings, and we do value being able to be vulnerable with other human beings.

"The number-one thing that I hope listeners take away from the podcast is that sex education is lifelong. Your eighth grade health class didn't do it."

There is great value to that. When you start telling your piss, shit, vomit stories, your sex stories, these connect all of us. Not everybody goes to movie sets as an actor. I can tell a story, like, that's not going to be relatable to most people, but I tell you about throwing up on the subway in New York when I was young, after that, and everyone goes, "Oh man, I threw up in a taxi, oh man, I threw up, da, da, da, oh man, I remember in high school, I remember…" Everybody has one of those stories, and that's what I love about this kind of storytelling, this medium. And why the stories had to be personal is because those are the most relatable, and why they had to be about sex and my body, and these first times of doing things, is because everybody has those. There's not a single person that will listen to this podcast that can't relate to something that I'm talking about.

EC: I can't wait to have conversations with friends after listening to this. Were there other topics that you considered for the podcast?

EB: I'd love to do a second season because, of course, there's more stories. I didn't tell any of my piss, shit, or vomit stories actually. There's only my sex stories. There's clearly a whole second season of piss, shit, and vomit.

EC: Another thing is, there's a lot about the shame, there's a lot about taboo in here. How important is it to you as a mother, especially, to start to break these taboos? Why is it important that we start talking more openly?

EB: Listen, I have kids, young boys, and they are about to hit puberty, and I am not prepared. Partly doing this podcast was for me to continue my education and get some resources so that I could create a home environment for my sons in which they feel their best and in which I prepare them in the best possible way to go forth. I'm sure I will fuck up a little bit here and there, but I really wanted to make sure that they felt that my husband and I were trusted adults in their lives. It's so important that kids feel that from their parents. 

Here's the other thing I'll say: I interviewed my mom on this podcast, partly because I thought it was really important to remind people that these conversations are not/ one-time things and they don't end when your kid leaves your home. You become your child's trusted adult for their lifetime, if you do it well in the beginning.

And you can always repair it too. It's never too late. I like to say that and remind that to everybody as well. Even if you didn't do it, do it tomorrow. You can start anytime. But, of course, I just felt like there's a lot that's going to come down the pike at me and it's going to come fast. They're going to see porn. I know what I did at their age. I know what interested me. They're not going to be any different. Human beings have not evolved. Puberty happens. There is no stopping it. It is coming. And the sexual awakening, it is coming for everybody. This is when they're going to figure out who they are as human beings, and to deny them or pretend that their sex lives or their sense of pleasure, their sense of relationships and interest in other human beings, to pretend that that's not going to happen or put my head in the sand, there's just was no way that was going to happen. I just want to make sure that I prepare them to do something holistic. 

The other thing that happens on this podcast, somebody gave us this great advice. They were like, "You really care about your kid's school life. How are they doing on their exams? Are they preparing for college?" A lot of parents are like, "I want my kid to go to college." Well, do you know what a big part of college is? Getting laid. It's a huge part of college. Are you talking to them about that? Or are you just being like, "Make sure you have a planner and typing skills."  

The other thing that happened to me, frankly, was the Me Too movement. That just was a bright shining light on my personal sex life and sexuality generally, and just the power dynamics in sex, and I need to address it in my own family. Because there's no way that things get better unless we are all addressing it within our own households.

EC: That's so interesting: power dynamics. That’s a tricky one to talk to your kids about. Even just hearing this makes me feel so much better as a mom, feeling the same thing. I have a 10-year-old daughter who went to school in thigh-high socks today and I had to have a real conversation with my inner Puritan about whether or not that was okay. I was like, "Nope, not going to shame her.”

EB: Oh man, there's such good advice from Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber on the podcast about that. She says the best tool in parenting is a shovel because you gotta be able to shovel your own shit out of the way so you can actually get real with your kids. They are their own people, your shit is yours. Don't make it theirs.

EC: You did have a lot of amazing guests on this podcast. How did you go about choosing them, sourcing them? Was it cold calling? What was your strategy?

EB: I had a great booker in Jackson Musker, shout out to Jackson. It was a group effort. I think we all put together a list of people, the team that I work with at Brownstone, my production company, they put together lists of people. We kind of had a spreadsheet going, and then as I wrote my personal stories and we focused up on what would be the beginnings or most compelling things to talk about, people fell off the list, people came back on, we found new people that we were interested in talking to. It had a lot of flow and some of them were cold calls. 

I read The Red Tent, an Anita Diamant book in 19- whatever '97, '98, when it came out, and it has stayed with me so long, and it was such a compelling cultural shift in my own thinking for me that we just called her up. I was like, "I just want to talk to her." And she's still talking about reproductive justice and menstrual justice and these issues that The Red Tent raised and she's an old-school OG feminist, who's fighting the good fight to this day and had so many interesting things to teach me and to say. So some of it was just that, it was like, "I loved reading this book. I love this is a topic that we're talking about. Do you think this person would want to talk to us about it?" And she happened to say yes. Peggy Orenstein was a huge influence on the podcast because she wrote two books that blew my mind. Girls & Sex, which I read with my book club. I've had a book club for 20-something years.

EC: Oh, really?

EB: All of us women, we give each other advice all the time, parenting advice, these are some of the women I've had the deepest conversations with. Our reading often creates these incredible opportunities for conversation like that. We read Girls & Sex and after I read that, I thought I need to read Boys & Sex as well, which was her follow-up book. I recommend them to everybody, anybody certainly who's raising kids, anybody who's under 25, and anybody who's just interested in what is the reality of sex and dating for young people right now in American culture, because these books, they'll tell you everything you need to know.

EC: Wow. That's a great recommendation. I don’t want to ask you to choose a favorite episode, but did you have a favorite moment during this project or something that really surprised you?

EB: So Lindy West is one of my guests. She's a best-selling author. She wrote Shrill. She's written three books, I believe, now. My production company turned Shrill into a television show, starring Aidy Bryant, and Lindy has become a friend and somebody who I trust to have the most interesting take on culture, bodies, being a woman. She's a heterosexual cisgendered woman, and just has a viewpoint on the world generally that constantly blows my mind. Every conversation with her teaches me something and makes me laugh. If there was a person who does the thing that I like doing, which is, again, make them laugh, make them cry, entertain, teach them, that's Lindy. Lindy puts all that into every conversation we have.

EC: What's the number-one thing you hope that listeners will take away from this?

EB: The number-one thing that I hope listeners take away from the podcast is that sex education is lifelong. Your eighth grade health class didn't do it. You need to check in with yourself and your partners throughout your lifetime, that it changes across your lifetime, and that it is an integral part of your holistic humanity, meaning that we like to compartmentalize sex into some sort of shame-filled corner of our life that we don't talk about and we don't want to know about, we don't want to hear that our parents ever had sex or did it in order to make us. It kind of starts there, right?

It starts with shaming people for having too many partners, too few partners, being a virgin, not being a virgin. There's just so much conversation around it. I read an article that said that human beings think about sex a minimum of once per hour, both genders. And I, in analyzing my own life, I thought, "Oh yeah, I guess that is kind of true." So to pretend that this is something that isn't a part of our daily existence is not reality. I really think that especially women's equality depends on people reexamining all of our notions around sex and gender.

EC: Wow. That brings me to the last thing I really wanted to talk about with you is that, especially with women's equality, I really related on a personal level to your story in your first episode about Kathy Ireland and the swimsuit edition and that "Oh my gosh, that's never going to be my body." For me, it was seeing Kate Moss and heroin chic in the '90s, and my friend and I still talk about how we can't believe we're never going to be waifs, but we're not. It still traumatizes us a little bit.

Even if this new standard shifts slightly over decades, it's always almost unattainable for young women. What is your take on how we can try to break this kind of destructive women-never-feeling-like-they-live-up cycle that we're stuck in?

EB: Yeah. It's a big question, it's a big question. And it's something that we all deal with and it's because, as we say on the podcast, we are being bombarded by cultural messages about what the patriarchy has deemed the hot body or the way to look or the best way to be from every angle. This is the thing, it really has to be an internal conversation unless we decide to change all of advertising and marketing for everything ever, right? Here's the other thing I'll say: there are beautiful people in the world, absolutely stunningly, beautiful people in the world that have incredible bodies and I like to look at them and I know people like to look at them.

I like to look at pretty things generally. There's something psychological or biological about that. So one, just accept that. There are beautiful people and it's okay to want to look at them. Here's the thing though. We all have to figure out how to love and live in the body that we are given. It's really, really hard to do when every image that you see all around you is something that's not you. So one of the things that can be done is we can do a better job with representation, and I think that's happening. The conversation has started and representation is happening. For instance, in the story on the podcast I mentioned, until 1996 there were only white women on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and we have to expand our idea of what beauty is. 

I remember watching Benetton ads as a kid, and the reason that Benetton was iconic, frankly, was not because their clothes were great. I couldn't tell you what a Benetton piece of clothing looks like. What I can tell you was they were, when I was growing up, the most inclusive brand when it came to marketing their clothes. When you looked at a Benetton ad, you knew it was a Benetton ad right away. Why? Because they used light-skinned people of color with freckles. They used short-hair girls, they used long-hair girls. Nonbinary-looking people they represented in a way that no other brand did at the time, and that's what made them interesting. And it worked on me.

"We all have to figure out how to love and live in the body that we are given."

In other words, it expanded my idea of beauty and that's what has to happen. We have to all go, it isn't just this one thing that is beautiful. Many things are beautiful, many things have value, many things are worth looking at, and that you can be part of that. To me, it's really a cultural thing. Until we're changing the imagery that is bombarding us, I'm not sure that we have the internal tools to overcome. It's really, really hard to give yourself a break. If all you see is waifs for the entire '90s, yeah, you're going to be like, "Why don't I look like that?" A lot of it is about changing the cultural standards of beauty, and that's really hard to do.

EC: Do you think any of this changes as we start to put COVID behind us? Has our being stuck at home and now reemerging, has any of that changed? I know you talked about your post-COVID bathing suits on the podcast.

EB: Well, like everybody, I ate way too much ice cream during the pandemic, so I aged a year and a half. And nobody got to go to the gym, because the gym was closed. So, of course, my body matters to me partly because it's for my job, so I also like to remind people that I stay fit for many reasons. One of which is it's my job. One of which is it helps me psychologically stay healthy with my endorphins. Actually working out and eating better makes me feel better. 

So being in tune with that regardless of what I look like externally, doing those things helps me internally feel better about myself and about life generally and keeps my energy and my attitude at a higher peak level. But, of course, there's also the external factor, which is I have an ego and I like looking cute and I've looked a certain way a long time, and I don't really want that to change, but here I am today as the youngest I'm ever going to be. Tomorrow I'll be a day older. So it's important to remember that today's my best day.

EC: Yeah.

EB: 'Cause tomorrow I'm older.

EC: Yeah.

EB: Thank God by the way. 'Cause the alternative, the alternative ain't no good. I'll take this over the alternative every day.

EC: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I am, like I said, fascinated by this project. I can't wait to share it with people. Thank you. I will be recommending it to a lot of people.

EB: Thank you. I'm so glad. These are the conversations that I have always had with my girlfriends, and I just felt like why not share this with the world and also get some real advice and professionals to talk to us about it, as well?

EC: For those of you listening, just a reminder, you can get My Body, My Podcast on Audible now. Thank you so much.