212: The 5 Ps of Having a Penis — A Better Way to Talk to Boys About Sex

Mitch: Hey, listeners. A quick content note. Today's episode includes some very honest talk about sex, bodies, and family planning. If you've got kids around and you're not looking to accidentally start "the talk" on maybe a random Tuesday, maybe pop in earbuds or save this one for later. All right. Let's do a deep breath, and we'll get into this.

Let's recreate the classic birds and the bees talks that it seems like almost all of us got, right? Kid asks, "Hey, where do babies come from?" or, "What is sex?" and an adult suddenly forgets every single word in the English language. Maybe you go through the lines that are "when two people love each other very much." It seems like a bunch of us got that. "Here's a diagram." I was one who got diagrams. It really didn't mean anything to my little brain, right? And then we never speak of it again.

So we are going to be having the sex talk and a crossover episode. We've brought on some of our fantastic experts and providers from our women's health podcast, "7 Domains of Women's Health."

I'm Mitch, and you're listening to "Who Cares About Men's Health," where we share a little bit of information, inspiration, and maybe, just maybe, a different interpretation of men's health. I'm Producer Mitch. I'm kind of the resident health convert.

We've got a bit of a full house today, so we want to go around before we get too far in. The self-proclaimed "bringer of BS" to our show is Scot Singpiel.

Scot: I can't wait to tell you all about the sex talk I got, because it was a doozy.

Katie: I'm looking forward to that.

Mitch: Right? And the MD on at least our side to our BS is urologist and men's health expert Dr. John Smith. I'm sure you do this kind of talk a lot.

John: I'm excited to hear Scot's story now as well.

Mitch: Oh, good. And joining us today for the crossover are the two brilliant and beautiful and lovely women's health specialists from our sister show, "7 Domains of Women's Health." Two women who have taught me more about women's health in my 30s than my entire upbringing, the internet, and at least a handful of locker room conversations combined. So thank you so much for agreeing to be on here.

First and foremost, we've got Katie Ward. She is a women's health nurse practitioner, and just recently got your PhD in anthropology. Thank you so much for being here.

Katie: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. More than a locker room, huh?

Mitch: And last but not least, we are joined by Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones, who is one heck of a women's health provider, educator, and a professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and one of the longtime stars of The Scope Radio. Dr. Jones, so good to have you here.

Kirtly: Oh, good. Thanks, Mitch.

Mitch: Katie and Kirtly over on the "7 Domains" are exploring the seven domains of family planning, which kind of got me thinking. Family planning is not just a solo sport or a single partner decision. It's not just a women's issue. And honestly, the first step of family planning is "the talk," the sex talk, how we educate young people for procreation and, I guess, recreation.

So Katie mentioned in one of the episodes of "7 Domains" that she had a framework that she used with her own sons that she called The 5 Ps of Having a Penis. We're going to explore that a little more.

We're going to share some of our own sex talk stories, and then we're going to actually learn what these five Ps are and how it might be a really helpful framework, and not just for guys out there who have kids that maybe will eventually have to have this conversation. Or if you are like myself or any of the male co-hosts who are here, maybe we have a lot of education we're about to get today.

I want to start with how we got the sex talk, and I'll go first. My parents were very pragmatic when they first had kids. I was the oldest. The idea was while my mom was pregnant, they said, "Mike," who's my dad, "you're going to handle drugs and alcohol. I will handle sex." They split up the hard talks. There was this idea of divide and conquer, right?

Katie: That's practical.

Mitch: Well, I was 6 years old and curious. And so my mom drove us down to the Hollywood Video. There was a "Discovery Something-something" video, animated, of where babies come from. Took us down, brought my little brother in, and is like, "I'm going to get this done today."

We sat and we watched the video, and I had a million and one other questions, and she didn't have all the answers. And she was always very good about having these conversations, always really open about, "Hey, do you guys need some condoms?" She was that cool mom. But that's all I got. I kind of had to figure out . . . other than the just bare bones mechanics, I had nothing else to go off of.

Kirtly: She did more than so many. So good for you. Good for her.

Scot: I mean, what else is there though? I think she covered it. If it was just mechanics, that's all we really need to cover, right?

Katie: Wrong. We'll get there.

Scot: Wrong? Okay.

Mitch: So how about you, Scot? I mean, you're red in the face. What is going on?

Scot: I don't really have a recollection of having the talk at all with my parents, although I think some form of it must have come. I think there was some book with some pretty poor drawings with a lot of the important bits. "When a man loves a woman, they . . ." I think something about going to the bathroom together came to my mind.

I don't remember really ever having the talk, but I do very distinctly remember a time when I was in sixth grade and I lived on a ranch and I was out doing ranch kid things, and I saw a bull go on the back of a cow. I saw the anatomy and I saw where the anatomy went. And I remember at that moment I went, "Oh, that's what's happening." That was when I figured it out. Was there any information after that? No. Just the locker rooms Mitch hangs out in. So that's my . . .

Mitch: Now, Kirtly, you've been at this game for a very long time with education. And our producer Chloe, who produces the "7 Domains," she said you had a story.

Kirtly: Oh, I have lots of stories, but my own story was receiving a kid's book on how babies are made when I was about 6, and I told my mom what I had heard on the swing set at the playground. I got the book. She'd had it all ready. She got the book, gave it to me. I read the book, and I looked at the pictures, and that was it.

That was it until I was 16, and my dad took me and my 14-year-old brother into the basement with a big, long broom handle and a bunch of condoms and showed us how to put a condom on a broom handle. And there were leftover condoms, so I could have them.

Then I immediately decided that there was no part of that physical encounter that I wanted to be part of. Not at all. So that put me off for about four years. And the rest I learned when I was in college by the University of Colorado. Thank you very much. Go Buffs.

Mitch: Now, I love the fact that your dad was like, "We've got to do this in the basement." That was the sense. "I need to hide away."

Now, Katie, you're the resident . . . You've got a bunch of . . . how many boys did you have?

Katie: I had four boys, one girl.

Mitch: Wow. So four boys. How did you get your talk, before we go into the type of talk that you had?

Katie: My own talk, I don't actually remember exactly, but I remember it was something like yours, "when a man loves a woman and they love each other in this special way," and it's all about pregnancy. So what I do have in the back of my mind was that there wasn't a lot of agency for the woman, and pregnancy was the goal.

I internalized that message, and I was pregnant at 17 and had one son very young, and then three stepsons. And so that was probably part of my motivation to build a better talk.

Mitch: Sure. And I'm excited to get into that. But before we get into the 5 Ps, I did want to ask, because we've got some providers in the room, what are some of the potential pitfalls that happen when we don't have these types of conversations well?

John, how about you start? What are some of the things you see as a men's health specialist?

John: Sure. I mean, in this day and age, I've seen a lot of people who come in and maybe they haven't had the best talk. But like you said, they might have hung out in the same locker rooms you and Scot got around in.

I think there's a lot of misconception. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of things that people learn as they go. There is still some stigma, I think, around sexual intercourse and different things. I don't think that as many people as you would think got taken to the basement to put condoms on brooms or bananas, but you see some of that.

But I do see a lot of that. Another thing that I see, a handful of patients who have been introduced to adult film industry in one way or another, and that's been detrimental to some of the sexual expectations that they have, as well as the oftentimes manual stimulation and masturbation that goes along with it can make it difficult for intercourse with their partner later.

I see a fair bit of that where folks find someone, and they're unable to maybe have a climax with their partner because of the aggressiveness of manual stimulation or other things.

And so I see a fair bit of those types of things in my practice and just ultimately misconceptions and different things that are out there.

Scot: I'm fascinated to get into this conversation a little bit more because I think that there's a preconceived notion out there that the talk is all about pregnancy. Katie, when you said that, that it was very much about pregnancy, there are so many other aspects of it that need to be considered.

And then when John and Kirtly and you, Katie, talked about your experiences with grown adults, it just is really occurring to me how important it is that this conversation be more than that. It's really setting the basis for how you enjoy sex with your partner in addition to pregnancy, and how you formulate your identity of yourself or formulate identity of women in your life if you're a man. So I'm really looking forward to this.

Mitch: So Katie, where did this idea of The 5 Ps of Having a Penis come from? And what are those five Ps?

Katie: So as we talked about, I was raising four boys, and we had a pool, and everybody would come hang out at the pool. So I not only had my four boys, but I had a lot of their friends hanging around.

And the idea honestly came to me in the middle of the night. I have to say, this is one of those middle-of-the-night . . . I was mulling around something and I like alliterations, so it occurred to me that I could frame this in a string of words that I could remember to put together.

I think in the opportunities to have this conversation . . . It's not really something you can just say, "Okay, it's 6:00, and tonight is when we do our health educations in our family." I mean, maybe families do, but usually it's that something comes up. There's a conversation and there's an opportunity, and I wanted to be ready to have this conversation.

The first time I presented it to one of my sons, he stood there shuffling his feet back and forth. He stared at the ground, and he didn't really look at me. But I gave my little talk.

I mean, my kids honestly still . . . The reason I think it resonates is they still talk about it. I was at a Super Bowl party last night or night before last, and one of my son's friends was talking about this talk. So it lasts. It was just a simple framework.

So this was 25 years ago. You've got to keep that in mind. I did have the sense that all of my boys were heterosexual. So if you catch a note of that, it was me responding to something I felt like I knew about my kids at that point.

My framework was if you're going to use your penis, which is a P word, you needed three other things: permission, protection, pleasure. And since then, I've added to my framework power and porn, because there have been some things that have happened in the last 25 years that have made me think about power and porn a little bit more. So that's it, five words.

I think anybody could just put those in their head and think about what works for you in your family, for your values, what you know about your children, and who their partners are.

You don't have to do it all at once. You can spool it out a little bit at a time in reaction to where your kids are developmentally. But I think within that, you can cover a lot about what are the important things to be considering when you're thinking about getting the penis out.

Kirtly: You have to laugh a little.

John: I like it.

Mitch: All right. So let's educate at least Scot and I with these five Ps.

Katie: Let's start with permission, and then we can kind of break them down. And again, this was my little speech. Anybody can adapt this to what works for them.

I think some of this was happening around the time of some high-profile cases going on in the public domain and I wanted to talk to my kids about how important permission was. And I just was saying this is about making consent sexy. I wanted to tell them that if you said to somebody, "I want to hold your hand," if they were into that, they were going to like that. They were going to respond well to that.

And then you could ask the next step to say, "I'm really feeling like I'd like to kiss you. Is that okay?" And you could ask at each step along the way and wait until you hear yes. So that's checking in and expressing how you're feeling and finding out if it feels okay for the person that you're with.

Scot: The way you just explained that was fantastic. Because you get taken to the basement for this conversation, you can't even have a conversation about it. But it's like, "Hey, I'd like to hold your hand." "Okay." It's the same thing except for it's not, but it's the same thing. And if the person says yes, then great. If they say no, great.

I've always felt like it had to be this . . . I don't know. Do you get what I'm saying? You didn't dare ask. You just had to feel your way through, like, "How's this person responding right now?" But that was such an adult way to put it. I wish I'd had that 50 years ago.

Katie: I mean, I can also say being on the receiving end of someone asking me for consent, that also is pretty sexy. I'll tell you, I like that just fine.

John: Yeah. I think even that permission, as you're talking about that and you talk about when do you start that, I feel like we started that when the kids were young. You talk about what's okay and okay touch.

I started that with my kids when they were young. I said, "These are the people that are allowed to touch your genitals. Mom and Dad change your diaper, Grandma can change your diaper, Auntie changes your diaper, and the doctor when they examine you. And anybody else that touches you, you need to let me know."

I mean, when you talk about "When do you start those conversations?" I think I've already started that with each one of my kids at that young age because times have changed in 25 years, like you said. We started those conversations at an early age, and I think it dovetails very well into when they reach that moment of time of, "Oh, yeah, you've been talking about this my whole life, that there's an okay time for this, and it's got to be with my consent."

I have had those opportunities to have those conversations with my kids, and I think this P is awesome because you don't have to wait until they're in their teenage years to start with that P.

Kirtly: Yeah. Absolutely.

Mitch: So how about number two, protection?

Katie: So number two, again, I said to my boys that protection was making sure that contraception wasn't just assumed to be the woman's responsibility. I talked to my sons and said, "You've really got one of the best methods available to you. You've got condoms that protect you both against pregnancy and against sexually-transmitted infections."

I made a promise to them, and I kept it, that there was a basket of condoms that I kept next to the Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet, and I just kept it full. I said, "No questions asked."

And next door to that was a box of emergency contraception so that if a condom broke or fell off or, God forbid, it didn't get used, the emergency contraception was right there. Again, refilled it, no questions asked. They could give it away.

I just said to them, "You should never assume that someone else is using that. This is your responsibility. You've got these methods available. If anything else fails, please let me know. I'm going to be there to help you."

But we just talked about what they could do for protection for themselves and for their partners.

Mitch: I like that it was not just . . . Again, cool mom. Hi, Mom, love you. It was like, "Come talk to me if you need me to go buy you something." And I'm like, "Oh my god, no." It's just like, "Hey, it's by the Band-Aids." I love that so much.

Katie: They came and went, and I didn't ask questions. If they were getting distributed, that was okay with me.

John: For sure. And I tell a lot of my patients today who are having multiple partners or having new partners, "Hey, I get it you don't want to have a baby, that's fine, but you also need to think about STDs. Right now we have a bacterial-resistant gonorrhea strain that is out there, and we only have ceftriaxone. That's our last line of defense."

And I think in today's society, if we get to the point where these sexually-transmitted infections, we don't have any antibiotics against them, that really is a very dangerous situation to be in.

The CDC has put out a nice little three-minute video of, "Hey, gonorrhea has gone through these cycles where it now is resistant to damn near everything we have."

Katie: And there are no new antibiotics in the pipeline.

John: Exactly. And that's the thing I point out to these people. I go, "This is the reason to keep your genitals out of harm's way right here, if nothing else."

Mitch: So how about we go to the next one? Pleasure.

Katie: When I was actually giving this talk to my own children, this was the end of my conversation. I saved it for last. These were sort of in order of . . . I don't know if it's fair to say in order of priority, but in my framework, it was, "Talk about permission, then talk about protection," and pleasure was a little bit more the advanced part of the conversation.

But I really did want my boys to understand female anatomy, and I got pretty specific. So this is where to put the earbuds in. But I was sort of like, "This is what the female anatomy looks like. And the clitoris, this is the part of the anatomy that we're going to talk about. Penis-in-vagina intercourse may not produce an orgasm for your partner."

I wanted my boys to understand that if they're going to be a sexual partner with a person with a clitoris, they understand that that is the primary source of orgasm for women. And it's not optional. It's mandatory. And when they were at an age for that, I was pretty specific about it.

Mitch: I didn't know. I had no idea where these things were. I even had the little structure, but it was mostly, again, how to get pregnant. It was not that this could be a good connecting thing, a social thing, a meaningful thing. So I like that a lot.

Katie: Again, adapt this for your own environment. But I'm getting out the book going, "Okay . . ."

John: But I think that's an important part of it too. We've had that conversation with my oldest daughter when we've had that conversation, and she's like, "Well, why would you want to do that?" A kid just doesn't have that insight. We said, "Well, if you want to have a family, that's how you make a baby. But it also feels good too. It's a way to connect with your partner. And so Mom and I have a connection with each other where we enjoy having intimacy with each other that involves sexual intercourse." We're very open about that with our daughter.

And I've talked to her about . . . we've had conversations with her about it. I think that's an important part of it that I think is evolving from the "Leave It to Beaver" generation that Scot came from up to now.

Mitch: I don't know, John. Even just you talking about that, if I was a 14-year-old, I would die. I would curl up and die.

John: She's super uncomfortable, for sure.

Mitch: I would go straight to my little notebook about, "Dad is the worst today."

John: I'm sure I have many entries in the journal that start that way.

Scot: I want to throw out to the crowd here of learned individuals, how do you navigate that though? Because that's going to be the reaction, right? There's going to be a lot of embarrassment, but that shouldn't stop you from having this conversation or having it often.

John: When I can tell my daughter gets the awkward hands and she's just like, "I'm not having this conversation," I say, "Well, is there anything you want to know?" I turn it back on her. "Let me stop, but let me hear what you . . . What's on your mind at this age that you have that you want to know about? We're going to have this conversation, and you can lead it, or I can lead it, one of the two. So you pick."

And that's actually been very disarming where she's been able to ask things. For me, that's what I've done, Scot.

Scot: Katie, how about you? Or was it never an issue? Was the embarrassment not an issue?

Katie: I mean, it was not an issue, I don't think. I'm sorry, I wish I could say . . . Yes, they were embarrassed and they'd sort of shuffle away, but I also knew that when they brought their friends over and said, "Remember that thing you told me? Will you tell Cameron?"

Kirtly: Yeah, I think first of all, it's some self-awareness. People may not be culturally or personally comfortable in doing this, and I understand that. And if they can't, they should find somebody who can.

We had a wonderful session on the 7 Domains of Family Planning on the emotional domain with Annabel Sheinberg, who's an educator, and she's really good at it.

There are people out there in clinics and family planning clinics and OB-GYN clinics, probably pediatricians. Most pediatricians, if you ask the pediatrician, "Will you please talk a little bit?" If you can't, recognize that you can't and find someone who can that you trust.

So I'd say your pediatrician, if that's the right person. Your gynecologist could probably do it for men and women. And Planned Parenthood has sex educators that are just there to have the conversation.

But listen. You're right, John. You have to say, "This is what I'd like to talk about, but mostly I want to hear what you want to know. And if you don't want to know today, please, we'll bring it up again when you're ready to know. But you need to know this before you drive. If you want to drive, you want to learn how to drive, then you have to have the talk with me."

Katie: Yeah, so that was my original framework, was permission, protection, pleasure. As time has gone by . . . And this is one of the things I was thinking about for all of us as parents. We're educating our kids with the information we wished we had a generation ago, but we're maybe not preparing them for the world they're in now.

I did not see the #MeToo movement coming. That was where the power concept came from. And it gets back to the thing about permission a little bit, but I think for this generation, talking about the difference when there's a power imbalance. If you're in a position where you're a boss or a teacher or a coach, that impacts consent. That power imbalance then eliminates the possibility of an equal kind of consent.

And so I think that that is a conversation that we all need to have now. Regardless of whether you're the person in power or not in power, that influences how decisions get made.

So that's how I added the fourth P. I think that's another important conversation that I wasn't seeing 25 years ago.

John: I agree too. And I've had this conversation with family members and also friends' kids who are in high school that are 18. I've had that conversation. "Hey, this is a big deal now, because if you do something at this point that's seen in a poor light, the consequences for you are very different than they were 3 months ago when you were 17."

And I tell them a story. I'll divulge a little bit into my degenerate past. When I was in high school, we were 16 and 17 years old, and we went down to Deer Creek Reservoir in Provo. We took some sleds, and we got in the spillway, and we were sledding down the spillway, which is illegal for the record. Don't do it.

Now, as kids, we thought this was fun. This is federal property. And so when we got caught, there was one of us that was 18, and luckily, he ran up the hill and got to his truck. But the rest of us got tickets, and we got these misdemeanor little tickets that we got to go to kiddie court and sit through a two-hour class of, "Don't be a bad kid." But if we would have been 18, we would have gotten a felony criminal trespassing violation. And that's the difference.

I was two months away from receiving a criminal trespassing violation. And I tell them that. I say, "That would have completely changed my life. I would have been blackballed from medical school. I would have had a felony on my record. I would not have been able to go and do the things that I've been able to do. And so you need to think about those things in your life because you're now not two months away. You are in the category of you need to get to the truck and not get into trouble at all, and don't even get in the spillway."

Katie: Yeah. Are we ready for the last of the Ps? This, again, is not one I . . . Twenty-five years ago, I didn't quite see the internet coming the way it is now, but I remember being at a conference with one of my heroes, Esther Perel. It was like a V8 moment for me. She said no young man coming of age today has their first sexual experience with a human being.

Young men, almost universally, their first encounter with something erotic is going to be on the internet, whether they're on a full-on porn site or they're just kind of bumping into things. And I was like, "Whoa, that is a sea change from the world I grew up in." It's not even that kids are necessarily seeking it out. It finds them.

And John talked about this earlier. Those early influences of porn . . . and we can talk about this as much as you want to. The combination of things that frighten you and turn you on, they are addictive and they get in your head. It does influence your sex life, and it influences how you relate to real live human beings.

Honestly, I could talk about this a lot. We're seeing the consequences of availability and the access of porn or erotica. It's easier than getting consent from somebody. It's less risky. You go to the computer and your kink, whatever you like, is just right there. It never turns you down. You don't have to navigate all these intricacies, and you don't risk rejection. Maybe it even seems like a logical choice. You don't have to worry about pregnancy or sexually-transmitted infections, and it's just always there.

I do think it's a real problem for people in terms of kids seeing it when you don't want them to. What it does is it gets into your head. I think it is something that we've got to be talking to our kids about, and thinking about how we protect them from that.

John: I mean, I have the opinion of . . . I see a lot of patients who have problems, and I've had conversations with my adult friends about this who've struggled with it too. And one of my friends even mentioned, "I think my phone knows when I'm laying down. My phone knows whether it's in this orientation or this orientation. I have seen my algorithm change just by that phone kind of being tilted in an upward manner."

I've talked to plenty of younger kids in my office who have these addictions to pornography. And I grew up in the age where internet was coming to, and if you wanted to see it, you had to go steal your friend's dad's magazine and take it and hide it in the backyard or hide it somewhere and hope someone's mom didn't find it. 

Nowadays, a lot of these kids, like you said, it's just there. And the consent now for these kids costs $10 if they want to see their specific whatever.

I think there's a lot of this that's detrimental. And as I see these young men come into my office in their 20s who have struggles now with erectile function or ejaculatory dysfunction, all these different things that I see, I'm becoming more of the opinion that pornography is like alcohol in pregnancy. There's no safe amount that these kids can consume because it is so addictive to the brain and gives them so much. It's very hard for them to get out of that rhythm.

I see that a lot for these kids, who it just takes them down this path of unrealistic expectations and makes things very difficult in their relationships that they are entering into, or in and out of, in their life.

Katie: And I think talking about it is the most important thing. I think what we're doing here, to be like, "Yeah, it's a thing, it's out there, and we need to be thinking about it and discussing it." I wish I could say I had all the answers. Do you treat it like an addiction? I do sometimes wonder, as a clinician, about if that framework of treating it like other addictions is the way to treat it, or if it's helping people make real-world connections.

I mean, at the end of the day, we're an animal that likes others of our species. I think if we can make connecting with real humans as easy and available as porn is, we would probably still like that.

Scot: For me, as a communications scholar, I hear porn, and that's just another form of communication that parents are competing with, right? So if nothing else, you have to address that, talking about it the way we just did, how it can impact the brain, how it can impact expectations.

But that's telling, that's communicating to young people, "This is what sex is like. And you know what? Five in one, permission and porn kind of go against each other because you don't see a lot of porn with permission being asked."

So I think it has to be acknowledged, especially if you're thinking about this conversation like Katie is in this holistic manner, where everything helps and builds on everything else and gives the fullest possible picture.

Katie: And that is exactly what I want to share with people. I've written this up and thought about giving it as a TED Talk. Just have those little segments in your head: permission, protection, pleasure, power, porn. And when the opportunity arises, then you're prepared, you're ready to talk about it. You can scale it up, scale it down, adapt it for your values, for your person that you're talking to and their circumstances.

But I think it's a nice alliteration that helps you think about the components of this beyond just "when a man and a woman love each other, there's a special thing."

John: And I love the alliteration too, because if you think about most of the things you learned when you were going through training for becoming a physician, becoming a nurse practitioner, all those alliterations, I remember 99% of them.

Katie: Mnemonics. Yeah.

John: And so when you give this to a kid and it's one of those things that's catchy, it's pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and it's easy to remember. That's one of the things that when they sent it over on the pre-show and I was reading through, I was like, "Genius." It's not something where they have to remember, "Well, what did they say about this?" It's like, "No. It's the five Ps. And even if they get three or four of the Ps . . . You've GI Joe'd them. Knowing is half the battle at that point.

Katie: Well, I hope so. I hope it helps somebody out there. I can tell you, kid-tested, kid-approved.

John: Love it.

Mitch: Well, it's helped me a lot, and I think that it is something that I will be thinking of moving forward. But I do want to take a sec as we kind of wrap up here to . . . what are some of our takeaways? What did we kind of learn from this conversation? What are some of the things that we might carry on with us to the next part of our life? And let's start with Scot. Scot?

Scot: I don't have kids, so I don't ever have to have this conversation. But if I did have kids . . . I'll try to put myself in that position. I love this framework for a couple of reasons. One, I think, as a parent, you owe it to your kids, even if you feel uncomfortable having this conversation, to try and fake it until you make it. Fake that confidence, have it over and over again. Normalizing these things is so critical.

And then the other thing is this isn't one conversation where you go to the basement, get out the broomstick. This is an ongoing conversation throughout the year, numerous times.

And I think this framework is great because when any of these things come up, you can address just one of them. You don't have to address them all at the same time. But you can address one, and then that message sinks in over time.

And I think it will make much healthier, more well-adjusted adults, sexual partners, having a better understanding of their partners and an understanding of this thing we call sex, which can oftentimes be off in the corner and taboo.

Mitch: How about you, Kirtly?

Kirtly: Once again, it gets back to the fact that there are going to be parents who aren't in a situation to even talk about that. They're in abusive relationships themselves. They're so overwhelmed that they're abusing their own substances. So if you can't do it, it would be great if you can open your heart and listen to your kids or make your kids know that you're not judgmental about these issues. And then you might be able to remember the five Ps and bring one out.

But if you can't do it, please help your kid find someone who can that you trust, or just pass this podcast around. There you go.

Mitch: All right. How about you, John?

John: I think this is fantastic. I think normalizing this, having those conversations, and not making this stuff taboo, where you're having these conversations on a regular basis, and it is normalized in life. Intimacy is something that everybody should have and enjoy is my belief.

I think the three practitioners that we have here, we all kind of have it easy because that's the space we live in. My kids know that I help people with their genitals, and I do vasectomies, and all these other things that happen. I've got a little bit of a leg up on some of my friends.

And so I think Kirtly's point of finding someone you trust if you're not comfortable doing it . . . Send them over to my pool or Katie's pool, and we'll have a conversation with them. But that would be my take-home.

Mitch: And Katie, you have created this lovely, wonderful system. Did you learn anything from this conversation today?

Katie: I'm just reminded how important it is to . . . that it's not static, that you've got to pay attention to the world as it's changing. Add to this and update it and be thinking ahead about the world that your loved ones are growing up in. It's changing fast.

Mitch: Yeah, we might need to learn how to deal with AI companions rather than just broom handles in basements, which I just . . . Thank you. I love that so much.

Scot: That's right. Start working on that last P of AI. I don't know how you're going to work that one out, but Mitch might be right.

Mitch: So my personal takeaway is . . . Again, I also don't have kids, but I do have a nephew, and I do know that there are listeners out there that have been able to learn something and change something and think a little differently than some of the other media forms do. And I'm just so delighted that we could kind of have this conversation.

Thank you guys so much for joining us over here on "Who Cares." Thank you so much, Katie and Kirtly.

Kirtly: No, thank you.

Mitch: Listeners, if you liked this episode, why don't you go check out the "7 Domains of Women's Health"? They're wrapping up their 7 Domains of Family Planning right now, and it's genuinely one of the better explainers we have on our whole Scope network. Definitely worth checking out if this is something that is of importance to you.

If you're listening and thinking, "Oh, I should probably have a better version of this conversation," or maybe you don't have kids and you're like, "Oh, man, maybe I should learn a little bit more about this," my challenge to you as listeners is to start small. Pick one P. Maybe this is the conversation that you prep for and find an opportunity to open up with your kid, or maybe it's worth taking a little bit of research or diving a little bit into shows like "7 Domains" to learn a little bit more about.

And of course, you can always let us know how it goes. You can reach out to us at hello@thescoperadio.com. Love to get mail from you guys.

So anyway, thanks for listening, and thanks for caring about men's health.