Let’s talk about sex, with comedian Sara Pascoe

At base we are all nothing but mammals, but we’ve learned to pretend that we’re not. Through thousands of years of development in our customs, norms and laws, we’ve chosen which animal instincts to repress and which to embrace. This distinction is one taht writer and comedian Sara Pascoe has had to consider for her new show, Animal, and debut book of the same name.

“I think with all of them there is a seesaw between consciousness and instinctual drive,” she says. “We can't really use instinct to excuse anything, because we have another mechanism going on – just because something's instinctual doesn't mean we can't change it.”

Time and again as a species, we prove this, for better and for worse: we diet, we refrain from hitting people even when they annoy us, and we construct complex legal and social systems to try to stop people having sex. This sexual instinct has baffling implications throughout our lives: after all, with us humans it’s not a simple matter of reproduction; engaging in the no-pants dance can be just for fun. Both the science and the emotions of sex get a good going-over in Pascoe’s book, and it’s a panoramic vision: the blood, the babies, the insecurities, the crimes, the consequences and even a couple of intimate hand-drawn diagrams are within its pages.

“Just because something's instinctual doesn't mean we can't change it”

Animal combines autobiography and anthropology with keen analysis and comedy. Pascoe introduces us to ideas on sex and genetics which were accepted as true and without question for years, only to then blow them out of the water with our old friend rationality. Throughout history, writers and researchers of a particular race, gender and sexual orientation made discoveries which mostly reinforced their existing worldview, and which in turn could be solidified in law. “Sometimes you kind of have to read between the lines,” Pascoe says, on these kinds of biases. “A lot of times in the book I was going, ‘Obviously, this means heterosexual people, not all people.’ Other books weren't doing that. They often [made] these huge sweeping statements that didn't include a huge portion of our society. It kind of baffled me that often there wasn't even a question mark.”

Pascoe presents her life story as many of us see our own: sometimes as if through a camera lens, often through dialogue, mostly as part of a narrative heavily affected by our expectations and views on the world. By setting these pieces of autobiography alongside the research she presents, Pascoe gives us concrete and relatable ways of accessing that research and seeing how it affects our lives, both consciously and subconsciously. We learn about pair-bonding and oxytocin release through her tales of loves lost and found, and then look at how dodgy science is used to justify infidelity or obsession.

Any autobiography can delve into a writer’s inner secrets, and here Pascoe talks in detail about her experience of abortion: “I've never talked about it in standup because it isn't something that I already had an angle on. But when I knew I would be writing about the female body and how it works, one of the first things that came to my mind was, well, I got pregnant and I felt very betrayed by my body.” With time to look back and analyse her own life, Pascoe presents us with a rounded picture of growing up in a highly sexualised world full of expectations of how people should act. “I knew I wanted to write about hating my mum's boyfriends and that process of looking at an adult and really judging them, and then becoming an adult and understanding my mum.”

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It would be easy to get lost in either the personal or scientific detail of such topics, but Pascoe manages to interweave her different aims in a way that amplifies them all. The science is interesting because it affects our lives in such serious ways; the autobiography is honest and often dark, but doesn’t feel like an over-share because Pascoe herself has managed to see the ridiculousness of so much of it and turned it partially into comedy.

Keeping the book accessible while still being informative was her top priority: “I thought if I can't explain this in real life, it can't go into the book. It has to be a lay-person's book, because there are other books that are written by scientists and have that information in them. The balance I had to have was how much would be too much information if I was expecting a 15-year-old girl to read this, or a 15-year-old boy. My idea was that it could be a sex education book.”

Teenager or not, judging from the amount of misinformation bandied around, we could all use a bit more – and more accurate – sex education. Pascoe notes of her own upbringing: “I didn't have the internet when I was 15 or 16, so my research was restricted to those books you get about periods and basic sex education.”

The UK government’s recent rejection of compulsory sex ed in schools has potentially hampered our knowledge once again, and where these classes are still taught they are often focused on the mechanical, physical aspects, and otherwise are found wanting. “They don't teach you about emotions, and they don't teach you the difficult bits of sex. Children and young people can have really specific knowledge about the extremes of sexual behaviour [thanks to porn], but haven't heard much conversation about how much the emotions can hurt.”

For the most part, Animal the book aims to educate and pose questions, not preach. The show is similarly reflective, focusing on empathy and our capacity to care about things outside ourselves. “The underlying question is how to be good,” she tells us, “so has our evolution meant that we are selfish and self-interested, and we won't ever really care about climate change?”

Empathy is another consequence of us ignoring or repressing our basic instincts – this time overwhelmingly for the better. “I think it's like a muscle,” Pascoe explains, since there are many instincts, like selfishness, which aren’t seen in such a good light these days. “Those things actually, in terms of evolution, are very healthy things that have kept you alive, but now you don't need them in the same way as your ancestors did.” We can tip that seesaw over with our consciousness and intelligence, she explains: “You can work, I think, like a muscle, and train yourself to do different things.”

Armed with information as unbiased as possible and with the knowledge that we have power over our in-built desires, we can embrace our sexual instincts and reject our selfish ones. As Terry Pratchett once put it, humans need to be allowed to be ‘the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.'

We can keep learning and updating our expectations of other people, as is already happening in some parts of society: “People who are teenagers now,” says Pascoe, “really grasp the idea of gender fluidity and sexual fluidity much more than my generation.” Overall, despite discussions of neurotransmitters, morning sickness and consent, we can come away from Sara Pascoe’s Animal with a feeling of hope.

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Animal by Sara Pascoe is out now, published by Faber

Sara Pascoe: Animal: The Leadmill, Sheffield, 8 Jun; Brewery Arms Centre, Kendal, 9 Jun; City Varieties, Leeds, 11 Jun; The Lowery, Salford, 25 Jun; Harrogate Theatre, 30 Jun; The Stand, Edinburgh, 19 Jun; The Stand, Glasgow, 20 Jun; The Lowery, Salford, 25 Jun; Harrogate Theatre, 30 Jun.