    
Securing Sexuality is the podcast and conference promoting sex positive, science based, and secure interpersonal relationships. We give people tips for safer sex in a digital age. We help sextech innovators and toy designers produce safer products. And we educate mental health and medical professionals on these topics so they can better advise their clients. Securing Sexuality provides sex therapists with continuing education (CEs) for AASECT, SSTAR, and SASH around cyber sexuality and social media, and more.
Links from this week’s episode: 
Promoting Authenticity and Healthy Connections in the Digital Age
In today's digital age, where social media platforms dominate our lives, and virtual interactions have become the norm, prioritizing authenticity in intimate relationships has become increasingly important. The rise of online dating, virtual friendships, and digital communication has shifted how we connect with others, often blurring the lines between reality and the carefully curated versions of ourselves we present online. Here, we explore authenticity's significance in intimate relationships and why it should be a priority in the digital age.
Authenticity Breeds Trust: Authenticity is the foundation upon which trust is built in any relationship, and intimate relationships are no exception. In the digital realm, where it is easy to create a false persona or embellish aspects of our lives, it is crucial to be authentic with our partners. By being genuine to ourselves, we create an environment of trust and openness, allowing our partners to feel secure and confident in the relationship. Authenticity bridges virtual and real-life interactions, enabling couples to connect on a deeper level beyond the digital façade. The Dangers of Misrepresentation: In the digital age, misrepresentation is a growing concern in intimate relationships. The pressure to present an idealized version of oneself can lead to dishonesty and deceit, ultimately undermining the foundation of any relationship. When individuals prioritize projecting a perfect image online, they risk sacrificing authenticity and genuine connection. Remembering true intimacy can only be achieved when both partners feel comfortable being their authentic selves, flaws and all. Navigating the Social Media Landscape: Social media platforms have become integral to our lives, and navigating them responsibly in intimate relationships is essential. While there is nothing inherently wrong with sharing aspects of our lives online, it is crucial to balance authenticity and oversharing. Couples must establish boundaries and discuss what is acceptable to share online to maintain privacy and protect the intimacy of their relationship. By prioritizing authenticity and respecting each other's boundaries, couples can create a healthy digital presence that enhances their relationship rather than detracting from it. Embracing Vulnerability: Authenticity in intimate relationships requires embracing vulnerability. It is essential to create a safe space where both partners feel comfortable expressing their genuine emotions and thoughts. In the digital age, vulnerability can be challenging as we are often bombarded with carefully curated images and stories that portray a flawless reality. However, prioritizing authenticity permits us to be vulnerable, allowing for deeper emotional connections and a stronger bond with our partners. Effective Communication: Authenticity is vital in effective communication within intimate relationships. When individuals are genuine and open in their interactions, they foster an environment that encourages honest and meaningful conversations. In the digital age, where communication is often reduced to text messages and emojis, it is crucial to prioritize real-time, face-to-face conversations to build a deeper understanding of each other's needs, desires, and concerns. Couples can avoid misunderstandings and nurture a stronger emotional connection by prioritizing authenticity in communication. In the digital age, where virtual interactions have become the norm, it is vital to prioritize authenticity in intimate relationships. By being genuine, embracing vulnerability, and maintaining open and honest communication, couples can build a solid foundation of trust and connection. In a world that often encourages the projection of an idealized self, valuing authenticity becomes even more crucial. By recognizing the dangers of misrepresentation and responsibly navigating the social media landscape, couples can foster genuine intimacy that transcends the digital realm. Prioritizing authenticity in intimate relationships in the digital age is essential and a powerful way to cultivate a deep and meaningful connection with our partners. Key Concepts:
Wolf Goerlich: Hello and welcome to Securing Sexuality. The podcast where we discuss the intersection of intimacy and information security. I'm Wolf Goerlich and my co-host is my lovely wife, Stefani Goerlich, who…
(Recording) Stefani Goerlich: – as I foreshadowed, I'm not actually a technologist at all. I am a certified sex therapist and a PhD-level clinical sexologist, um, which usually makes people go, ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ But I am also a cyber criminology dropout.. Wolf: – and you might have gathered that dropout is not live with me. That's her on stage. We are at Hacker Summer camp which is a point in time in August in Las Vegas. It’s mostly held between two conferences, Black Hat and DefCon. And then along the way, there are a lot of other events there is B-Sides Las Vegas, there is the Diana initiative, and there's SquadCon. So this talk is a talk that Stefani gave out there, subtitled “Rewiring Our Most Intimate Connections.” (Recording) Stefani: My specialty is actually the BDSM and kink. That's what I do in my clinical work. *crowd cheers* Wolf: I’m not gonna lie, her specialty is pretty fun. So this podcast is going to be bringing you excerpts of that talk from Las Vegas. And she starts by talking about the Venn between sexuality and technology, right? And the sexuality side, there's relationships and health and consent, concerns around stalking and assault. There are, you know, objectives for gender identity and expression, and of course, pleasure. Now, on the technology side, I would add pleasure, but she did not have that on that slide. That part of the event there are things like privacy and security, augmented reality, virtual reality, AI, monitoring surveillance apps and websites. All the things we talk about here on this podcast. (Recording) Stefani: And so Wolf and I launched the Securing Sexuality Podcast which we do every week, and we didn't mean for it to be a forever thing. We just wanted people to know right away, right after Dobbs, what they needed to do to not get arrested – or to not get, um, donkey hunted or any number of the crazy stuff that's happening right now. So we did two episodes called “Privacy in a Post-Roe America” (Part 2, Part 3) just because we could get it out easily and it was click a link and share it. You have everything you need to know and it really exploded. We've been working ever since. Every week we do something on the intersection of intimacy and technology, and it's super fun because it's a sex therapist and a hacker talking about stuff. So that's kind of why I'm here because I do a lot sort of at that Venn. Wolf: You know, one of the things that people often ask me is, you know, why am I doing a podcast about sexuality and relationships? And I oftentimes point to the fact that that's where we are the most vulnerable right? And if we think about security as finding and alleviating the pain that comes from vulnerabilities, here is a point in time where we're all most vulnerable. Stefani oftentimes gets asked the opposite. Why is she talking on a technology stage? Or why is she out at Hacker summer camp? So here's her answer to that... (Recording) Stefani: But this is one of my favorite quotes. Justin Garcia is actually a fellow at the Kinsey Institute, which is the oldest sexology research program in the country. And it's about technology, and I think it's really, really impactful, he says. There have been two major transitions in heterosexual mating in the last 4 million years. The first was the agricultural revolution. The second is the rise of the Internet. It has changed so much about how we act romantically and sexually, and it is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint. And so that is kind of how I explain what the hell a sex therapist is doing talking to you because literally, we are at an evolutionary moment that we have never been able to experience before. Nothing that we are dealing with today or talking about today has ever existed in all of human history. And it's all evolving so rapidly that the technology changes almost before we are able to understand how it's rewiring us. Wolf: And whatever your relationships be, them personal, professional. It's all about communication, right? It's all about, um, conversation. And it's oftentimes all about storytelling, how we express ourselves and express our stories. (Recording) Stefani: I really like this, “technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.” Remember that because it's gonna become problematic and a little bit sad later. Wolf: Now, what's interesting is when we have these conversations, uh, at cocktail parties, but not only at cocktail parties. People often times like, Yes, we know, right? We know we grew up with technology. Our generation was all online, or our generation came of age when, you know, we made this transition from a pen and paper into the digital world. And that's true. That's true. I wish people wouldn’t tune out at that point in time. That's true. It does feel like technology has already been there. But that's part of what Stefani means when she's talking about the evolution at least evolution within the past two generations. (Recording) Stefani: That is part of that evolutionary moment that we're talking about we're not talking about – I always think about like middle school science class, where they're like, we're gonna teach you about selective mutations by showing you moths outside the coal factory. Look, it's five generations. They went from white to Grey, that sort of thing. We don't have five generations. It's everything. And it's all-pervasive now, and that's what makes it so evolutionarily unprecedented. And, yeah, technology isn't scary. We have a lot of benefits that come from using technology, but with those come a multitude of other risks, too, you know, we have instantaneous access to information, but that also means other people have instantaneous access to our information. We can talk to anybody around the world at any time, and those communications are monitored. Wolf: And I love how she goes into the pros and cons of technology here. You know, it's one of the things they oftentimes think about right as a security person. A lot of people are like, Oh, no, Here he comes. He's gonna tell me about how bad technology is, and at the same time when I talk to people who are building products or when I talk to people who are launching websites or when we have folks who are entrepreneurs on this podcast, they oftentimes are so focused on the positives. “This is great, blah, blah, blah.” And so when you're like well, what happens if they don't always have a good answer? (Recording) Stefani: The Internet and this rapid communication has expanded global communication, but that also can be used in negative ways. For every grassroots positive campaign to promote civil rights, we have people being targeted, doxed, and harassed. Wolf: And now what's interesting about what Stefani is saying here from a security perspective, is oftentimes like when we're doing security. There's this thing called a threat model. You determine what could possibly happen. And you think about your threats. You sort of model their behavior. And we think in, uh, professional cyber security about the criminal we think about the hacktivist, we think about the nation-state actor, right? We think about targets of opportunity. What do we normally not think about? We don't normally think about, uh, the user-on-user violence. Uh, and we certainly don't usually think about terrorism. (Recording) Stefani: The term stochastic terror is A) almost impossible to pronounce. And B) one of the things I found myself talking about, most with my colleagues these days, Wolf and I did a podcast episode about women in Texas being targeted for seeking reproductive health care. We finished recording that. I went down. I picked up my phone. I spent way too much time on Reddit. Don't judge. And somebody had posted this in the two X chromosome subreddit, and it was literally like pregnant in Texas. I don't expect you guys to read it all. I'm not gonna read it to you, but she's literally saying I just saw that I was pregnant. I don't know what to do. I don't have any resources. I'm in Texas, what do I do? And I showed it to him at the time. I'm like, Look, we literally 20 minutes ago we were talking about this and here's an example of it. And then we went to bed. And then the next morning, I woke up and in another subreddit, somebody had posted screencaps from where somebody had taken her post, posted it on 4chan and was asking, “does anybody know how to find her? She wants to have an abortion, and I want to report her,” in less than 24 hours. This is stochastic terror. Stochastic terror is when [removed] says, Look at these horrible group of people over there. Aren't they the worst? Somebody should really do something about that, and they never actually make an overt call to violence. They just say enough that the people know what they should do, and they plant the seed, the people they go to act on. Wolf: So, needless to say, this is pretty problematic. And we've done episodes, uh, around helping therapists prepare for this, you know, to batting down the hatches to get your information off online. But it certainly is something that security people don't oftentimes think about. (Recording) Stefani: I think a lot of people in my world are being targeted for the work that we get harassed. Doxed called out on TikTok as groomers and exploiters and people that are corrupting the youth and people that are killing babies and all sorts of things. Wolf: So that's how you know terrorism fits in as a threat. But also, we got to go back and remember, like, every technology, right? Like Stefani was saying earlier has pros and cons. So we gotta look at the benefits while we're trying to figure out how to minimize the downsides. (Recording) Stefani: One of Wolf's favourite quotes. When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. And when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress In my world. When I talk to other clinicians about this, they think I'm talking about these things they think I'm talking about porn use or online gaming, or revenge porn, which is a very problematic name because it's not consensual material. They'll talk about radicalization, Qanon theories and the spread of conspiracy theories online. And so when we talk about, like, the invention of the plane, you get the plane crash. This is what my colleagues think I’m mean, and then I tell them that actually, I'm talking about this motherfucker right here. Wolf: OK, ladies and gentlemen, the Elf on the Shelf has entered the chat (Recording) Stefani: Every year from November to New Year's, I have this conversation with every single one of my parents and clients because the elf on the shelf has become like this cultural phenomenon, like it started out as this weird little capitalist thing, right? Like you go to Target and you buy all the outfits and you're like, OK, you're just trying to get money from me. But it's become a legit holiday tradition. It's like people post their pictures and their kids look forward to it. And like it's this whole year-long build-up of this thing that is literally branded as a narc for Santa and with the normalization of the Elf on the shelf, we get the normalization of a whole bunch of other weird flipping holiday stuff. I'm sorry if anybody growing up in the eighties or nineties had walked into a house that had Santa and said this house is under surveillance, that would not have been normal. The fact that I found multiple examples of security camera Christmas ornaments is not normal. The fact that you can buy Elf surveillance cameras, it is not normal. This is what we need to when I talk about like the evolutionary shift, because none of this is normal. But it is all it has all been very, very rapidly normalized under the guise of love and fun and family tradition and holiday affection. It's become a way that you show you care. Wolf: Now, what's always interesting about this is what happens to you when you're little becomes part of your affection patterns. Uh becomes part of your erotic maps when you're an adult, and so, as you might imagine, and this Stefani is about to get into first really, uh, interesting and surprising impacts. (Recording) Stefani: –and it's creepy, but it's been normalized, and it's starting to happen. across the lifespan. I realize that stream and learn remote is not quite as like dystopian as some of the other things, but I don't like the idea of teaching babies to stream. I just think that that's again. It's one of those, like, small, little, insidious things. And then you have, like, the really cool little friendly robot that your parents are watching you and the jewelry is beautiful and the jewelry all contains GPS trackers. But the thing is, maybe you know that maybe you don't, because if your boyfriend buys you a pretty sparkly necklace and doesn't tell you it has a GPS tracker in it, it's a problem. And what we have is literally the Internet is we'll be generous and say 50 years old. But the surveillance culture and the normalization of surveillance as affection is probably maybe five years old, and yet it has become so completely normalized. If anybody were to walk out of this room and be like I learned about that narc the elf on the shelf and why is a problem for cybersecurity? You're probably gonna get the same look I got when I put this slide up. But now I see my boy. So privacy, you guys, I'm not gonna explain privacy from a cybersecurity perspective, but from a mental and emotional health perspective, privacy is what lets us be healthy, functioning human beings. Privacy is what lets us have healthy boundaries, distinct identities. It is necessary for Children's identity formation. It is necessary for healthy adult relationships. And it is quickly becoming something that we are trading away because we think that's how we build relationships. Which is a problem, because we can literally live our entire lives online at this point, from conception to death. Wolf: And at this point in time, Stefani has a great set of slides that talks about all the technologies that come into play right? From dating to wedding, planning to fertility, tracking to selecting baby names to our first kids. Photos and videos, uh, recording schedules for them, uh, online schooling. And I love that phrase, “the normalization of surveillance as affection” because it plays out as she laid it all out in this talk on all these stages of our lives. And of course, also in all these stages of our lives is telehealth online therapy, which many of us take… (Recording) Stefani: Literally. Last week this week, my telehealth platform provider rolled out new terms of service, and it was weird because they were a little like aggressive about it. They're like you guys have two weeks to sign the new terms of service or else you will no longer be able to access your client files, which made everybody go huh! That seems weirdly aggressive. And so we started reading the TOS and they want any form we've ever uploaded becomes theirs. Any answers our clients have given us on those forms become theirs. Um, it is incredibly broad. They say it's anonymized, but then they say anonymized to a point where it can no longer be recognized by a natural person, which is a problem in the age of machine learning. Because that's weasel words to let us know that it could certainly be identified by AI. It's incredibly problematic. And now I have two weeks to find a new telehealth provider. And as one of the only therapists that's tech-adjacent. I'm like, maybe I just need to go back to pen and paper like there's not gonna be a hacker walking into my home office and – except for the one I'm married to. But my point is, we're doing all of our health care online. We're doing our therapy online, and then once our kids that I tracked my fertility to have and copa it online and educated online and got their health care online are adults. And we are old. Our parents, my kids are gonna manage my old care online, and they're gonna check it on grand on Grand Online. And they're going to coordinate with our health care providers online, literally from cradle to grave. Our entire lives are lived online, which is OK if you don't think that surveillance is love. Wolf: And of course, one of the things that I'm wondering at this point is whether and where and when researchers have tested the effects on the loss of privacy on self or the problematic uses of technology across our life spans, right? If surveillance is being conflated with affection, if surveillance is being conflated with love, what does that mean? What does the research show us? (Recording) Stefani: There can't be a longitudinal study of child development, mental health, and parenting outcomes. If we're adopting technology as it's coming out. It's absolutely untestable in any way, shape, or form. And the weird part is that we've come to think it's normal, but really it's not. We were talking about meeting boys online. We are actually the minority. I was surprised Only 30% of Americans have used a dating website ever. It goes up to about half if you're under 30. But everybody here is going Wow, because that's not our expectation. Our expectation is that this is just the norm. Only 9% of you said in the last year. Only one in 10 meet their people online. But more than half of women report being harassed, and almost two-thirds of men report being scammed. Wolf: And so Stefani had some great stats here about how, uh, a lot of the conversation we're having online is not necessarily the conversations we think we're having, right? The stories we're telling are not necessarily the stories uh, that, uh, that we think are being told. Maybe it's a person, but not the person they claim to be, more often than not, it's a bot. And of course, the rise of bots is way way up, surprisingly up when you think about how often you're having a conversation and you think it's a human. (Recording) Stefani: So think back to the quote that I said I liked in the beginning. “The technology is the campfire that we tell our stories about.” It's a campfire in Westworld. Yeah, and that's fucked up. But what it does is it's giving us an illusion of concussion. It's letting us think we're forming meaningful relationships. It's letting us think that our partners are engaged, or that our friends are engaged, or that we are engaged. But half the time we're not even interacting with another human being. Wolf: so that's weird. We all know that's weird, but from a security perspective, you're looking at like, what is the threat? You know, what is the vector or what's the vulnerability they're taking advantage of, and what's the impact? And so as I'm listening to this talk, one of the things I'm thinking about at this point in time is all right. Yeah, talking to bots is creepy, and oftentimes talking to bots is very frustrating. But what is the real impact of that? (Recording) Stefani: And from a mental health perspective, that's a problem because I don't know if you guys heard the CDC declared loneliness a public health crisis this year. Yeah, loneliness is a public health crisis. 60% of us feel lonely on a regular basis. I bet you every single one of us could pull out our phones right now and text 100 people, or tweet 100 people, or mask it on 100 people. But half of us say we have three or fewer friends. We have access to a lot of people. We don't actually have relationships with a lot of people. And 50% of people feel like there's nobody in their life who knows them well, which is mind blowing when you think about how much we share all day, every day. In so many ways and so many platforms and so many people, more than half of us going nobody knows us. Nobody knows me. I'm completely alone. I don't have any friends. Yeah, and being in a relationship doesn't actually make this better. One-third of people who are married report feeling lonely in their marriage. More millennials are cohabitating for financial reasons, which doesn't sound like a loneliness thing, except they're not forming partnerships. They're forming financial arrangements. They're coming together because of convenience and necessity, which is not going to have the same emotional impact that coming together because I want to build a life with you, no matter who you are. How many of you there are guys and half of divorces happen because I just can't talk to them. They don't get me. They don't know me. This is why it was called a public health crisis. Loneliness has been significantly linked to premature death of all causes, but specifically heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, anxiety, and suicide. Wolf: And these rates only go up right. Problems hit marginalized populations, ethnic minorities, erotic minorities. All these populations struggle more from loneliness. (Recording) Stefani: Brace yourselves. You picked a really sad time to watch. I'm just gonna apologize up front, my friends. So there is this guy named Harry Harlow in the fifties whose name makes him sound like he should have been making really cool, like stop-motion animation. But he is not that cool. He is the reason why we have review boards today. Um, because the experiments that he did, we would not be allowed to do today. These experiments are on YouTube. Please do not go and look for them unless you really want to. Like if you need a good cry, sometimes you need that cathartic release. Google this if you don't just let me tell you about it and we'll get through the other. So here's the thing. For most of human history, people did not understand that Children needed affection. Children. The idea that teenagers existed didn't exist until the thirties and forties. Children were simply small adults. They grew up into large adults, and that was it. That's part of why we see like Mozart was like composing Symp at six because they had no concept of child development. It was really common in the Victorian era. I'm a nerd. I'm a history relationship sex nerd. And I love reading like Victorian parenting manuals. They will literally be like Do not cuddle your Children. Do not hug them. Do not touch them. Do not kiss them. When they come down, you greet your Children with a firm handshake. You feed them and you send them on their way. Like the idea of parental affection was just not existent. Part of that was because of early infant mortality, but the other part of it was we genuinely didn't know how little kids developed. In the fifties, Harry Harlow decided to test this theory, and he wanted to understand what affection or the lack thereof did for the human brain. And thank God he didn't do this on actual human infants because, actually, at the time, people were experimenting on actual human infants. He did was he did several experiments, but the ones that are relevant to my talk is he created two wire monkey mothers, chicken wire frames, the little faces that you see and one was like wrapped in cloth, and it was heated and it was soft and it was warm, and the other was just bare chicken wire. But that's where the food was. And he put these little baby monkeys in there, and he just watched to see which mother they would go to. And the little baby monkeys would literally choose starvation over the lack of touch. They would cling to the soft, warm mother at the expense of being able to have food, or they would try and somehow navigate both. He was the one that learned that we actually have an evolutionary imperative physiological need for connection, which is a problem because in the last 50 years that connection is rapidly dissipating. Hence everything I've been talking about up until now. Um, there's a great deal of scientific evidence that social connectedness is a very strong protector of emotional well-being. And there is no question that social isolation has increased in our culture in the past 50 years. We are substituting actual, genuine sitting-in-the-room together relationships with I sent a tweet. I posted a scoop. I was on Facebook. I was texting somebody, and what we don't know is how does this impact us emotionally, relationally, physiologically? Because what we do know from Harry Harlow is that we are wired for connection, and we've started to confuse surveillance with connection and information sharing with intimacy. And that is a problem when everything is commodified. Wolf: It's most definitely a problem. But if you're wondering how this ties to vulnerability, listening to how Stefani brings these threads together. (Recording) Stefani: Each of us is now electronically connected to the entire globe, and yet we feel utterly alone. And from a security perspective, loneliness creates vulnerabilities. Lonely people are more susceptible to romance scams. I was talking to a couple of people and telling them why the sex therapist is talking to Black Cat, and she said that's hilarious because I had to get a Wolf a plus one for the party, and that's amazing. And I went, well, what are you talking about? And the minute I started telling them, we think of especially romance scams as like an ageing thing like the elderly are targets, my trainer was telling me, her 23-year-old son, she just found out. He's like, Can I borrow money? And she's like, Why do you need to borrow money? He goes, Well, I don't have anything in my savings. He's been giving it all to girls that bet online not, And she's like, Are you paying them for sex? She's like, No, they're my friends. They need help. They need help with groceries. They need help with rent. I'm just trying to be a good friend. And then last night, one of my friends like you need to tell when you're gonna move to stop. Tell them about my father-in-law because my father-in-law just got taken for a ride by somebody claiming that she was in Ukraine and loved him and wanted to marry him and needed help getting here. So we talk, and we think from a cybersecurity perspective, we think about romance scams as targeting the elderly. But the isolation, the loneliness and the conflation of surveillance with connection is leading to a lot more people across the age range being susceptible to this. I already talked about Doxing, especially for women and minorities, for for people that are parenting girls and minority Children online harassment, nonconsensual media sharing, which is actually what we should be calling revenge porn, exploitation, radicalization and bounty hunting. All of these become infinitely more possible and more probable when people are lonely and seeking connection online and thinking that the way that they build relationships is by sharing. Wolf: That's a side note that is true. She had to get me a plus one, and, uh, you know, there's a four we had to feel like. Please explain why this person would be a benefit to be at our event and, like, just tell them that, uh, you know, I look good on your arm and I'm good eye candy, but, hey, I share that with you to feel more connected. (Recording) Stefani: I know I surprised you guys when I said I was a sex therapist, so I have to mention something, actually sexy, right? We got a rebound from the sad baby monkeys. Uh uh. A new study just came out recently, and I always get the title wrong. But paraphrase it's like, what have we learned after 50 years or what have we learned about the effects of porn after 50 years of research? And the thing that was most interesting to me is that young people have an authenticity. That one of the one of the messages that this giant study found was that one of the things that they hear and sucks out a lot and the prevention workers and, um parents say to their teenagers about porn is Well, you know, it's not real, like that's it's completely exaggerated. It's very Hollywood. It's not real. But young people in their teens and twenties know that, and they're actively seeking out things that are more real. They're seeking out things that are created by amateurs and uploaded. They're seeking out sites that are centering people that have normal bodies or different, um, expressions or different gender presentations. They're not going for the like, airbrushed Playboy centerfold that most of us think of when we think about porn. They're fetishizing authenticity, which is interesting when we think about everything that we've been talking about. This idea that the way you know me most is if you know my most authentic self is becoming literally how we internalize our sexuality and our erotic identities Wolf: As a quick side note. In cybersecurity, we have security awareness training, right? Security Awareness Month is in October. And, uh, often times it backfires. We train people how to recognize phishing emails, and then we see a bump up in how susceptible they are to phishing. It was really interesting to me to hear that in the sexual education space, there's a similar thing going on right. You should be aware that porn isn't real and the reaction the human reaction is OK, um thank you for that information. I'm now going to seek out a very specific type of media – such a human thing to do. (Recording) Stefani: Coming back to be off on the shelf. This is what I mean when I said that people are literally teaching each other how to monitor their Children, how to monitor their spouses. And these are just the ones that I grabbed from, like the top row of the search. There are hundreds. It is an entire online community, especially on Tiktok. You can use search terms and find dozens and dozens, and it's all it's not malicious. These are not like I used to work in domestic violence or sexual assault. These are not abusive men trying to control their partners. These are stay-at-home moms who genuinely think that they have to protect their children to keep them safe. And the way that they do that is to monitor everything they're doing. And those Children grow up and they've learned their entire lives that my parents love me, and the way that my parents show that they love me is by monitoring me, and it just carries on to the next generation of romantic relationships. This is why I said, rewiring our intimate connections because we are making some incredibly scary behavioral adjustments as a culture that we have no way of slowing down, stopping, or studying. And I said that the people doing this are not necessarily abusive partners, but it certainly does lend itself to technological abuse, because when we normalize this, when this becomes an expression of love, when this becomes a way that we define security the way we define connection, the way that we define intimacy, we expose ourselves not only to vulnerabilities online but to vulnerabilities in our relationship as well. Wolf: Now the slide Stefani had for this section where she's talking about vulnerabilities, uh, had me a little bit twinging because she used the phrase a zero-day vulnerability. Now in my field, what a zero-day or an O-day is it's a vulnerability that's recognized. It's something we've discovered. It's something we're aware of. It's something we know about, but it hasn't been passed yet, right? So the clock starts ticking when you identify a vulnerability, Um, and then once the vulnerability is, uh, fixed, it's released in an update, right? And at that point in time, it's no longer a zero-day because we're at Day one of the patch being out and the clock starts ticking and you you want to patch things. So I was like, Errr – You know, my mind is like my gears are like, Oh, I don't know that you should call that a zero-day vulnerability But listen to how she resolves that because she did it really, in a clever fashion. (Recording) Stefani: So we need to patch for authenticity if we understand that loneliness and isolation is a vulnerability. The people that are developing software, people that are protecting people, people that are explaining information to people need to be centering authenticity as the way to bridge that gap. And what that looks like technologically is teaching people about authentication. You know, it's all well and good to say I know this. But the 23-year-old digital native didn't know that he didn't know how to authenticate the person that he was talking to. We need to be creating algorithms that are actually good and used for good and that center good. I – on our podcast we interviewed a guy that's building a social network for kinky people, and one of the things that they built in is that their system automatically scans for Dick that if somebody tries to send you the pick, the system sees it and stops it. That is an algorithm for good. That is, that is technology. So that's what thoughtful moderation. I am a licensed clinical social worker. I'm licensed in Michigan, Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. I have a PhD. I am a qualified mental health provider, and my practice is banned from advertising on Instagram because I'm dirty and grown up. So there is some moderation. But there is not thoughtful moderation, and people can find a lot of stochastic terror. People can find a lot of radicalization. People can find a lot of misinformation, but most of the moderation teams are not built to actually evaluate information. And so, like with my work, my colleagues have to put a 3 or an asterisk(*) instead of sex because otherwise it gets banned even if we're talking about safe sex or healthy sex or loving sex. Um, data collection protocols, security push alerts, actually asking those questions like, Hey, I if Facebook is already gonna be scanning all of our ideas, which we know they are, then why is that Facebook going like Hey, they just ask you for money? Do you know this person in real life? I mean, it'll pull up and be like, Do you want to use Facebook pay? I've seen that happen, but the technology is there. We're just not using it to patch for authenticity. Um, and then my favorite, so much of what especially social media and apps are designed to do is to be sticky, right, to keep people engaged, to keep people scrolling, clicking, viewing we should be designing to be slippery. We need to be getting technology to be a tool that is used to move people back towards each other instead of keeping them on screen. Because that's how we end up with sad baby monkeys. Wolf: I like that, too. That's something I'm gonna be talking about in just about every design. Uh, meeting in the next, uh, six months is we need to design to be slippery. Almost always. So many apps these days are built to give a dopamine hit or built to encourage scrolling or built to encourage engagement. I get that. I understand the thinking behind it. We want people to stay in our app, but Yeah, I mean, why not create apps that drive people to engage in person to be slippery? Such a cool idea. (Recording) Stefani: It's not about whether or not something is intrinsically good or bad. It's about balance. It's about where does it fit into the global picture? And what Markie Twist and Neil MacArthur said was, You know, we really don't actually know what healthy digital usage looks like, and because we don't we're pointing at all the things that make us personally uncomfortable and say, Well, that's the bad kind. Wolf: So Stefani is here talking about the five core principles of digihealth. Now, uh, Twist and MacArthur. They were on our podcast talking about this a few episodes ago. Uh, they will be at our annual conference. Or at least, uh, Markie Twist will be at our annual conference laying this out. But the principles of digihealth include the following. They include consent, right? Active, engaged, enthusiastic consent. Include protection from exploitation from harm of the use of the technology they include. Honesty makes sense. Um, they include privacy. Thank you. I know it's been an ongoing theme of this episode, but certainly something that I think a lot about as well, and they include pleasure. Right? Are you enjoying what you're doing with this technology? So that is, uh, those five core principles of digihealth. And Stefani laid this out in her slides and in the talk, But with that as context back to her for her next point. (Recording) Stefani: And so digital health, I think, is core to how we patch for authenticity as well. This is obviously an interdisciplinary effort. There's a reason why the sex therapist is talking and not her hacker husband. But we guest lecture mental health programs now where the hacker husband talks to the future of sex therapists. This is a multilayered thing, if that requires a lot of hands and a lot of perspectives. But we have to center the idea that privacy is an inherent human right and that we cannot have dignity and respect if we do not have privacy. Wolf: Exactly. And so there you have it in Vegas. Stefani lays out, uh, what the source of these vulnerabilities are right. This sense of loneliness, um, this sense of loneliness driven by conflating surveillance with affection, conflating surveillance with love conflating, uh, oversharing with connection. Uh, she lays out what the impact of that is, right? The various ways that when we're lonely, we fall for scams. We can be exploited, we can be harassed. We can, you know, share information. We shouldn't. She lays out different types of, uh, you know, actors threat actors who can do that from the caring and well-meaning partner or parent, to the potential abusive partner, uh, to, of course, uh, these groups out there who are whipping up stochastic terror. And she ties it all in with what the patch is for that vulnerability, which is, of course, creating technology that is slippery, creating a way and means that we can help people connect more personally and build up some resilience and ties it in with the digisexual framework. Really fun talk. I wish you guys could have been there and saw it live. So I wish our audio could have been a little bit better, but I really appreciate your patience, and I will go to her to wrap us up. (Recording) Stefani: So there you go. There's there's there's my lecture on sad baby monkeys why the off of the shelf is the devil and why we need to catch for authenticity. Wolf: And there you go. There's this week's episode recorded live at Hacker Summer Camp. Thank you for tuning in to Securing Sexuality. Your source from the information you need to protect yourself and your relationships. Securing sexuality is brought to you by the Bound Together Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit From the bedroom to the cloud we're here to help you navigate safe sex and digital age. Be sure to check out our website, securing sexuality dot com for more links to information we discussed here today, as well as our live conference in Detroit, which you can get a ticket at using the code POD15 for 15% off and shout out to squad for, uh, having Stefani out there and putting on a fantastic event, you'll find information about them in our show notes. So join us again right here for more fascinating conversations about the intersection of sexuality and technology. Have a great week 
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