Dr. James Burt Jr., an unboard-certified obstetrician from Dayton, Ohio, performed over 4,000 unconsented "love surgeries" on women between the 1950s and 1970s. Claiming female anatomy was flawed for missionary sex, he altered vaginas and clitorises while patients were unconscious, often causing severe incontinence. Despite co-authoring Surgery of Love to promote his methods, Burt fled after exposure, revealing a legacy of narcissistic exploitation that exploited women's fears within a permissive medical era. Ultimately, his case exposes the dark history of non-consensual cosmetic procedures driven by male-centric sexual ideals. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dangerous Sex Education00:15:39
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He is not going to get away with this.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yeah.
Is that started?
Did I do it?
Have we opened the podcast yet?
I mean, yeah.
You did it.
We're here.
I'm Robert Evans, champion podcast opener, winner of the Nobel Prize for starting his own podcast with a tonal grunting.
This is a podcast about bad people, the worst in all of history.
And today we have a real, real doozy of a son of a bitch to talk about.
And to talk about this, this just exquisite asshole is Courtney Kosek.
Courtney, you are one of the hosts of Private Parts Unknown, and you have an essay collection coming out soon.
Is that correct?
Well, I'm hoping to sell it.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's been written.
So.
That is the first step.
Totally.
Yeah.
It's about hawking t-shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour.
So shit.
That sounds like a life experience.
Yeah.
21.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
I'm just going to guess a lot of Keystone Light involved in that tour.
Good guess.
I too went to college in the early aughts.
Courtney, how do you feel about obstetricians?
Pretty good.
They're helpful people.
It can be helpful people.
Can be.
Can be helpful people.
Oh, key word on this podcast.
Keyword.
Yeah.
How do you feel about like vaginas?
Just as a, just as like a, like a, like in terms of the way they're, they're structured.
I did previously tell court that I picked her for this episode specifically.
I'm honored already.
Oh, yeah.
Just wait.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Court, how do you feel about vaginas?
Like structurally.
Structurally.
I don't have a problem with vaginas.
I feel like society maybe does, but society has some issues with them.
I think they seem fine.
But what if I were to tell you that decades ago, some random dude with a medical degree decided he'd figured out a better way to design vaginas.
And then what if I were to tell you that he decided to test his theories by surgically altering the vaginas of thousands of women without asking for their consent?
No.
No, it's a bad one.
Yeah.
That is the story we're going to tell today.
It is the tale of Dr. James Burt, who sucked, and unless he's died by the time this episode runs, still sucks.
I think he's alive in Florida still, which makes sense as to where this guy would be.
He's really, he hits the diffecta of shitty American places because he did all of his crimes in Ohio and then he fled to Florida when he got caught.
So it's a real perfect story.
Oh my God.
Is he still down in Florida redesigning vaginas?
He is.
No, no, no.
He is not allowed to do anything vaguely medical ever again.
Oh my God.
Well, that's right.
Yeah, I mean, that's broadly positive.
He didn't get the punishment that I think would have been fair.
But he's maybe still alive.
It's kind of hard to tell.
He's kept a low profile since getting caught.
Well, getting caught is the wrong word because he wrote a book about what he was doing and had no shame in it.
And it's a tale.
It's a tale.
Are you ready to hear the story of James?
Doctor.
Sorry, James Burt.
No.
Be respectful.
Yeah, I can't wait.
The man earned his MD, you know?
Okay, so James Cared Burt Jr. was born on August 29th, 1921 in Dayton, Ohio, which is already one strike against him, right?
You know, he's coming out the bat committing a crime, the crime of being from Ohio.
Now, yeah, anyway, James was one of two children born to Benjamin and Stella.
His dad worked in a manufacturing company as a superintendent, and his mom was a homemaker.
We have vanishingly little detail on his childhood, but we can make some assumptions based on when and where he grew up.
He was likely raised in an environment of casual, pervasive misogyny and male supremacy.
Sex probably was not discussed openly by his parents or in school.
The first sex ed in a major American city was implemented in Chicago in 1913, about eight years before James was born.
And the program was so controversial that it was shuttered almost immediately as a result of outcry from the Catholic Church.
They launched a massive protest campaign, forced the Chicago superintendent of schools, Ella Young, to resign.
I was going to say Midwest.
I was like, that seems like a very not happening.
I mean, it's simultaneously like, yeah, it makes sense that it would get shut down, but also like, good on you, Chicago.
They tried, right?
Like, they tried before L.A. or anywhere, you know?
They gave it a shot.
Didn't work, but you got to give them to give LA Young points for trying at least.
Not the Catholic Church.
Don't give the Catholic Church points for a lot.
No.
I know we both thought of things to say, but sometimes it's best not to make those Catholic church jokes.
Throwing their dick around everywhere.
That did get them in a lot of trouble eventually.
But not enough at the same time.
What we're saying is Sinead O'Connor was right.
So yeah, the federal government would not take any kind of stance on the matter of like whether or not sex ed was a good idea until 1918.
And what forced their hand was the sheer devastating frequency of STDs among American soldiers during World War I. Like the government was like, we don't want any part in this.
And then our military readiness was compromised by fucking.
And it was suddenly an issue that had to be dealt with.
Just like, oh my God, we're losing a lot of men from venereal disease.
Dudes are itching themselves off the battlefield.
This is horrible.
Yeah, they are leaping off of battleships and into the ocean to quiet the crabs.
We should probably say something.
The Chamberlain Kahn Act was America's first federal law regarding sex education, and it was passed to provide funding to teach soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea.
This had the positive impact of spurring large numbers of Americans to view sex as a public health issue, which is, broadly speaking, an improvement from where things were.
It also inspired school districts around the nation to copy the military in hosting sex ed programs in secondary schools.
And this was a thoroughly mixed bag because they weren't teaching how to have healthy sex.
They weren't teaching about how sex can function in a relationship.
They weren't like, it was just purely trying to scare kids about VD, you know?
Like that was the whole, all of sex ed was just trying to frighten children about the fact that their genitals were going to rot off if they had sex.
Was everyone still on the abstinence only?
Like was that happening in this era?
I think that attitude was so pervasive that they didn't have an abstinence only movement.
It was just assumed that like, yeah, it's bad to fuck before marriage.
And obviously all of the men are, but like, I don't even think there was a movement because it was so such a pervasive, like accepted thing.
Yeah, throughout the 1920s, when James Burt was a little kid, sex ed grew increasingly common.
When he was in school, he probably watched a film called The Gift of Life from the terrifyingly named American Social Hygiene Association, which is, that's a nightmare organization name right there.
The movie warned children about the, quote, solitary vice, which was masturbation, and cautioned, masturbation may seriously hinder a boy's progress towards vigorous manhood.
It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit.
Interesting word choice with the vigorous.
Love that.
Yeah, vigorous.
Also, don't you think masturbation, that would help prevent VD?
I don't, you know, we talk about this in the Kellogg episodes, which are airing the week we record this, but like there was a widespread belief that it would kill you, that like it would drive you insane and you would die.
Not totally wrong, but.
I mean, depends on how you do it, I guess.
But yeah, you'll also notice that they specifically say like masturbation is the thing that boys do that is bad for them.
This is because even discussing, even to like, even discussing female sexuality in order to like discourage masturbation was kind of too risque, you know?
Like acknowledging that it happened would be a bridge too far for these people.
Now, thanks to an English teacher named Lucy Curtis, a number of secondary school teachers in the 20s and 30s also attempted to teach sex ed through English literature, which allowed them to avoid talking directly about biology.
Instead, they would draw comparisons to health lessons, sex health lessons from passages in classical works.
Miss Curtis advised teachers, quote, read to them Lancelot's wild, passionate quest for the Holy Grail, and they will enter into the bitter experience of a soul which has rendered itself incapable of receiving the full spiritual blessing through the sin of yielding to impure desire.
So like, you're going to teach them about fucking have them read King Arthur's Tales.
They'll understand that the Holy Grail is sex.
Totally.
Yeah, that'll work.
It's why the crucible stopped our generation from fucking.
So in the 1930s, when James Burt was a teenager and had his adolescence, sex ed grew increasingly formal.
The U.S. Department of Education started publishing materials to train teachers during this period.
Most of these early classes focused entirely on warning children against masturbation and scaring them with exaggerated stories of the dangers of STDs.
Female masturbation was seldom discussed.
Even teaching about the negatives of sex could be dangerous.
In 1933, when Mexico's socialist government proposed compulsory sex ed for public schools, Mexico City erupted into riots.
So there were riots in a few countries about the concept of teaching sex ed that wasn't just don't.
Oh, shit.
Yeah, people murdered each other over this stuff.
Good shit.
And of course, Mexico City, the Catholic Church, was behind that one too.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the most influential progressive voice on sex ed during James's teen years would have been Margaret Sanger, who is a very problematic figure on her own, was a big eugenicist.
But Sanger also made huge waves for arguing that sex for the sake of pleasure was acceptable.
And she did this by urging people to use birth control, right?
She had other motives for it.
But the mere fact that you're saying birth control is the option and not abstinence means that you're acknowledging people can have sex and it's okay, you know?
So that was a big deal for a lot of folks.
It was the sign of kind of a shifting in the winds.
Now, again, there were major eugenicist implications for a lot of her beliefs, but the positive angle of it is that she was increasingly pushing forward a conversation that said, it's okay if married men and women have sex for fun, you know?
Which is something.
In 1936, Sanger helped push forward a Supreme Court case that overturned the Comstock law, which had ruled both birth control devices and information about birth control obscene and thus illegal.
So like talking about birth control was illegal because it was pornography, basically.
Oh my God, that's so fucked up.
That's like the Instagram advertising policy of present day.
Yeah, yeah, the Comstock law was that for everything, and Sanger helps overturn it.
The Supreme Court is like, oh, you know, it turns out the First Amendment means you can talk about condoms.
Which is fun.
I mean, it's a good law to overturn because it sucked.
By the time James Burt was 17 or 18, he would have been able to finally receive sex ed information that wasn't entirely focused around syphilis or the evils of whacking it.
James graduated in 1939 and went to Auburn University, where he met his future wife, Lucretia Perry.
He received his undergraduate degree after a transfer from Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1942.
He next attended medical school and he married Lucretia in the early 1940s before graduating with his medical degree in 1945.
I haven't found good information on what precisely inspired James to get into medicine, but based on his later actions, we can safely assume that he found himself gravitating most to the subject of reproductive and sexual health.
We know he paid close attention to developing sex research of the day.
He would have followed the developing work of a sex science pioneer named Alfred Kinsey.
Kinsey was a former biologist who'd gone from studying wasps to studying human sex after he started teaching a course on marriage for Indiana University and realized that there was basically zero good research documenting the sex lives of normal humans.
Dr. Burt's Early Life00:11:18
And Kinsey's a controversial figure too.
There's some good criticisms of the guy.
But his research is like...
I love that that gets you a little bit hard, Robert.
You're like, yeah, there's some stuff about that guy, too.
We might talk about, there's some like weird, weird shit with Kinsey, like genital torture stuff that, yeah, there's some weird shit with Kinsey.
I'm not going to, I'm not competent at the moment to talk about it.
But like Kinsey, there's some very founded critiques of him.
You also, if you're studying like sex health, you have to talk about Kinsey because he was the first person pushing this research.
And I'm going to quote from an honors thesis by Lauren Lavin for the University of South Dakota here.
In 1948, soon after beginning the Institute for Sex Research, Kinsey published one of the most influential pieces of literature in American sex history, sexual behavior of the human male.
Five years later, in 1953, he published Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
The books contained controversial information for the time as they detailed topics such as homosexuality, premarital sex, and even bestiality.
Yet this illicit information intrigued the public, and the books quickly rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
The most notably controversial information presented was the occurrence of homosexuality in America.
At this point, homosexual acts were illegal, yet Kinsey's reports detailed many people having homosexual encounters.
He estimated that 10% of the population was homosexual.
This statistic, now known to be higher than the actual percentage of 4.5%, was shocking to American citizens.
The books also contained innovative new measures for sex research.
The Kinsey scale, still used in sex research today, is a graduated scale from 0 to 6 that measures the level of homosexual orientation in an individual, with 0 being entirely heterosexual and 6 being entirely homosexual.
The scale was an important finding in research, as it provided the basis for homosexual research in a reliable way to measure homosexuality going forward.
And yeah, it's one of those things.
Also, I don't want to say that like 4.5% is the definite percentage of homosexuality.
Like, I don't think we have perfect data on that now.
And Kinsey's data wasn't perfect, but he was the first person who was studying this and not condemning it.
It was just like, this is the thing that people do.
Let's try to understand it, you know?
Which is, you get a lot of credit for that in my book.
And again, like 1952 or 48, 1948.
Sorry.
Like, that's, that's, he's very ahead of his time.
Totally.
Yeah.
And he, he also, like, started carrying out, it wasn't just like the thing that kind of first brought him to prominence was his, his, these kind of frank discussions of homosexuality, but he started also discussing just like heterosexual sex life in a way that hadn't been before, where it was just kind of trying to understand what people do and not judging it and not approaching it from any kind of moral or religious territory.
Just this is a thing people do.
Let's try to understand how common different things are.
When Kinsey's study went viral, James Burt was working for the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps, which he joined to avoid getting drafted.
He did a residency next at a hospital in Chicago and eventually wound up performing his residency at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.
He finally received his medical license in June of 1951 from the state of Ohio and moved back home to Dayton in the first of what would become a major series of poor decisions.
This is a very anti-Ohio podcast.
I think we're open about that.
Yep.
You ever been to Ohio, Courtney?
First mistake.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone who's been knows.
Yeah.
What a great response.
I know some lovely people from Ohio.
Oh, sure.
There's great people from everywhere.
Yes.
Yeah.
But not a prize.
Should have been a lake, is all I'll say.
We got, we don't have enough lakes, and we have too much Ohio.
That's all I'll say on the map.
Fair enough, Robert.
Robert.
James Burt started his own practice, which was focused on gynecology and obstetrics.
And he started his practice the year before Kinsey wrote his book on female sexuality.
Burt was not board certified in gynecology or in obstetrics, but that was not a barrier to practicing in those at the time.
I don't know if it is today, but at the time, you could do, as long as you were a doctor, you could practice gynecology and obstetrics without being board certified in them.
So he starts his practice, and less than a year later, he and his wife separate and he files for divorce.
This was a fairly rare thing at the time, although not as rare as you'd think.
The divorce rate in the 1950s was about 2.3 people for every thousand Americans, compared to about 3.9 per every thousand Americans today.
We've actually been seeing divorce rates decline over the last decade or so.
We're at like the same level we were in 1968, I think.
Interesting.
What was the reason for the divorce?
Was he just like, I saw a lot of pussies this year?
We're going to talk about that.
Yeah.
The James Burt story involves a lot of divorce.
The couple had two sons and a daughter who seem to have gone with their mother.
I don't think he kept the kids.
I haven't heard any sort of evidence that makes me believe the kids stayed with him.
We know very little about their situation because, again, he's divorcing her in the early 50s.
Women don't have a lot of legal aid.
You can't have a bank account as a woman.
Totally.
Oh, my God.
So yeah, we know that Burt was the one who filed for divorce.
He claimed his wife was unhappy with his financial situation, but this could very well be a lie because he was making a lot of money at this point.
He's a doctor, you know, and he's throughout his career a very successful one.
This could also be a lie because in 1953, a few months after he filed for divorce, when the divorce was still pending, James Burt traveled to Mexico, got a divorce in Mexico without his wife's involvement, and immediately married his second wife, Jerry, in Indiana.
Oh, shit.
The first bitch just got a letter in the mail like, okay, we're done.
We're Mexican divorced.
It's taking too long in America.
We're Mexico divorced.
And this will come up later, but you can't do that.
If you're married in the United States and you file for divorce and then just decide to go to Mexico to get, it doesn't count.
Like, that's not the way the law works, you know?
So he's, this is technically bigamy.
He's still married to his first wife when he marries his second wife.
Gary.
Is that true, though?
Sorry.
That is fascinating.
Can you not like if I get, is that still true today?
If I get married in the United States, can I only get divorced in the United States?
I don't know if you can only get divorced, but if you start divorce proceedings here and then move to another country without the consent of your spouse to get a divorce, it doesn't count, right?
Yeah, seems like you would definitely need consent.
Yeah, I'm sure you could like, if you were like, oh, well, I've moved, I've since moved to this other country.
I'm going to initiate divorce proceedings here instead of initiating them.
I'm sure that would work, but it does not work the way he did it because he was clearly just fleeing to Mexico to get a piece of paper that said that he could get another.
Like what he was doing was very deliberately shady, you know?
So Gary and James moved into a modern one-story house with a swimming pool in a wealthy suburban neighborhood of Dayton, which further undercuts his claim that his wife was unhappy with their finances because, again, he was making a lot of money.
I think he was just trying to say like, she's a gold digger.
That's why we're splitting up, you know?
And for things that come later, I'm certain he's lying about this first divorce.
Yeah, what a lame probe, bro.
So the couple had one child, and for a few years, things seemed to be relatively normal for the young doctor and his growing family.
But appearances were, in this case, deceiving.
A major part of James's job as an obstetrician involved repairing episiotomies.
At the time, the vast majority of women who birthed children went through an episiotomy, which is a surgical cut made at the opening of the vagina to ease childbirth.
This is not as common today, but back in those days, doctors believed it made the birth safer.
It was easier on the child's head.
And so it was the norm.
In some hospitals, 85% of births included an episiotomy.
Now things are different.
It's still done sometimes, but it was just like almost every doctor would just do it basically every time.
It was just kind of the standard thing.
This makes it safer for the baby, so we're just going to, we're just going to cut her open.
Now, it was not strictly necessary in most births.
And again, there's a lot of people who will say like this was an injury.
And it was, you know, it was like unnecessary surgery for a lot of people who received it.
At the time, the reason this doctors would just do this, because doctors would not ask the mother before doing this.
Right.
And this was not just an episiotomy thing.
At the time, consent was not a priority in medicine for anyone, men or women.
Your doctor told you what you were going to get and you would do it.
Doctors were probably the most trusted people in the country at this point.
It was a different era.
And it was just sort of the norm for a doctor to say, this is what needs to happen and for the patient to just kind of let it happen.
And they wouldn't tell you a lot of the time.
Like with an episiotomy, they probably wouldn't say, here's what'll happen unless you specifically ask.
Like it's just, well, you're going to get having a child.
I'm going to knock you out with drugs and do what's necessary to get the kid out, you know?
But that's how it worked at the time.
We're going to talk a lot about the history of medical consent in this episode.
But it was not a thing in the 50s, right?
Like just not a standard thing.
Episiotomies were so normal that physicians often did not discuss it at all prior to the birth.
This was despite the fact that many women hated the operation, which was extremely painful and permanently altered many people's ability to enjoy vaginal sex after childbirth.
Like most obstetricians, Dr. Burt performed a lot of episiotomies.
And then as a matter of course, he would carry out a repair of the episiotomy afterwards.
He would try to fix it.
And there was like a saying that like you would give them an extra stitch, you know, to tighten things up to make it more pleasurable.
And the more he did this, gotta love the patriarchy.
Just inserting themselves at every stage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Let me fix it.
Let me fix it.
Yeah, let me fix it.
Let me fix it.
Yeah, and I'm bringing all this up because James Burt is uniquely shitty among obstetricians in this period, but like they're all doing some shady stuff.
Like some stuff that we, it wasn't shady by the standards of the day, but now you look at medical science in that period and you're like, okay, that's a little messed up.
Yeah, so the more he repaired episiotomies, the more he started to have ideas.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up on the website Medical Bag to explain how what he started with.
We all know what happens when men have ideas.
Do not recommend.
Quote, the doctor believed that women lost all their part of their ability to have an orgasm following childbirth as a result of their vagina becoming too loose post-delivery, claiming that women's vaginas were, quote, large enough to drive a truck through sideways after childbirth.
That's Dr. Burt's writing on the matter.
Oh, yeah.
This is distressing.
It's going to get worse.
It's going to get worse.
As it normally does on this podcast.
As it does 100% of the time on this show.
The Truck Sideways Story00:04:16
Drive a truck through sideways.
Drive a truck through sideways.
That is what the words, buddy.
No.
No.
But you know what?
Where are you going?
Involved, buddy.
A lot of trucks because global capitalism is heavily reliant upon semis in order to transport goods and services across great distances.
I mean, you really pulled that shit together.
Thank you.
Would that be the products and services that support this podcast?
Absolutely is the products and services that support this podcast.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice in sellings, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Alimony and Divorce00:10:16
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back.
We're back, and we're just not going to think too much about that ad transition.
So, yeah, Dr. Burke decided to fix all that.
Between 1954 and 1966, Burt began experimenting on unknowing unconscious patients with his own variations of the standard episiotomy repair after childbirth.
Known for his heavy hand with anesthesia, Burt had human canvases on which to experiment after delivery.
He's a knock-em-out doctor, and he just starts fiddling around in there, you know, just kind of like experimenting.
Were these the days of operating theaters, or was that over?
Was he like, come on in, boys?
She's totally knocked out, and I'm going to try a few things.
He's on his own, I think.
I think sometimes he has nurses, but he's on his own.
Now, the exact nature of the surgeries he carried out varied over time.
At first, he mostly focused on making the vaginal opening tighter to try and make vaginas smaller and tighter and improve the sexual experience of the husbands of his patients mainly.
But in the late 1950s, Dr. Burt started reading the then newly published work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
Their work was groundbreaking for many reasons, but among them was the scientific data it provided on the fact that the clitoris played a key role in causing orgasms.
Dr. Burt synthesized this finding with his own findings over years of experimental episiotomy repairs.
The women he'd given his modified surgery to, he claimed, told him their sexual experience had improved after childbirth.
James Burt began to develop his own theories about human vaginas and sexual responsiveness from a book titled The Love Surgeon by Sarah Rodriguez.
Quote, Central to Burt's ideas about female sexuality and the surgery he was developing were his ideas about the role of the clitoris in female orgasm.
Prior to very recently, Burt wrote, the medical consensus had been that a vaginal orgasm was mature and orgasm from manipulation of the clitoris was immature, and thus the ultimate return of the vagina to normal by repair after childbirthing was completed seemed adequate.
But this, he noted, did not consider the role of the clitoris.
So in 1963, nearly a decade into his casual experimenting with vaginas, James Burt's second wife filed for divorce.
Since she is the one who filed, we're able to look at this divorce through the lens of someone besides Dr. Burt.
Gary reported that her husband had, quote, struck and physically abused her from time to time.
Yeah, she asked that her husband be kept away from her and that their mutually held assets be protected from him.
This was not an amicable divorce.
James fought back, claiming that he ought not have to pay his wife alimony because, and this is just an incredible line of argument, his divorce from his first wife still had not been legally completed in the United States, and thus his marriage to Gary had never been technically legal.
So that's his, his defense to paying alimony is, well, I got married to her illegally.
I was breaking the law when we got married.
So why would I pay alimony?
He's like, however, the paperwork lines up to best serve me, do we know if he did any fucked up stuff to her vagina?
We do not.
She had kids with him.
So probably.
But I don't know.
I have not run into confirmation of that.
Also, maybe not, because it is kind of uncommon, at least now.
I assume it was then too, for doctors to, you know, deliver their own children, right?
Like that's considered like maybe not the best idea.
So maybe it was someone else who did it and he didn't have a chance to get in there.
I don't know.
I haven't seen any sort of confirmation or denial of that.
But it was definitely not a friendly divorce.
The judge was not convinced by this line of argument, which is honestly kind of surprising for the time.
But he awarded Gary alimony and child support, and their divorce was finalized in 1966.
That same year, Masters and Johnson published a book, Human Sexual Response, which dedicated an entire chapter to the clitoris, which they labeled, quote, a unique organ in the total of human anatomy, because its only purpose was sexual.
They described it as an organ system which is totally limited in physiologic function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension, which was a big finding at the time.
And it kind of like went against a lot of the existing ideas about female sexuality, which had often just sort of seen it that it was like it was a variant of male sexuality, right?
Like female sexuality is just kind of like a lesser version of male sexuality.
Women don't enjoy sex as much.
Like it's not as big a deal for them.
They're not sexual beings in the way that men are.
And the Masters and Johnson's research kind of blows that out of the water because like women are the only like have an entire organ that's just dedicated to sexual responsiveness.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
It's pretty, it's great.
So this is like an important sort of in the in the history of like understanding human sexuality, this idea that like, no, no, human beings are all sexual beings as opposed to like, it's just, just people with, you know, penises.
Yeah, so outside of that, yeah, this was like a bombshell in medical science at the time.
And Dr. Burt was as influenced by this finding as everyone else.
Unfortunately, he also fell into a failure of deduction that similarly plagued Dr. William Masters.
Both men were physicians, and as a result, they both saw sex and issues with sex in strictly physical and conventionally medical terms.
The social aspects of sexual dysfunction, like unequal power dynamics or abuse within a relationship, were boiled out.
It was just purely a matter of like, oh, these are how the mechanics of sex work.
And it's like, well, it's not just a matter of hydraulics.
You know, there's a lot that goes on in sex.
Female sexual problems then were blamed on purely physical matters.
And I'm going to quote again from the love surgeon here.
According to Burt, he had not informed any of these women, the women he'd done surgery on, that he had done anything other than a standard episiotomy repair.
The combination of realizing the importance of the clitoris and sex for women and that the modification he had made to episiotomy repair was improving the sex lives of his patients led Burt to conclude that women's bodies were not anatomically ideal for heterosexual sex.
For Burt, female bodies were pathological when it came to heterosexual intercourse.
Based on the research of Masters and Johnson and the information about the improved sex lives he stated he heard from his patients, Burt decided the clitoris was too far from the opening of the vagina for women to receive adequate stipulation from the penis during heterosexual missionary position sex.
So he's got notes.
Oh my God, amazing.
Little bit of feedback for God or nature or whoever fucking made this.
Don't worry, I got it figured out.
Yeah, that's amazing, hubris.
Like, that's a whole, a whole nother level.
Like, it's, it's, it's something else.
Um, so yeah, he started to modify the, again, significant surgical procedure he'd already been performing on his patients without consent for more than a decade.
Up to that point, he'd mostly focused on making the vagina tighter.
Now he started building up skin tissue in order to move the vaginal opening closer to the clitoris.
This procedure also changed the angle of the vaginal opening.
Burt later bragged that under what he started calling his love surgery, quote, the vagina is so mad.
God surgery.
Like, you just need to learn how to eat a pussy, and then this will all just go away.
No, no, no.
That is not at all acceptable to Dr. James Burt.
It is, it is, I mean, it's a matter of like, there's a lot that we'll talk about this more.
There's a lot that's wrapped up in it.
Part of it is just this mix of men wanting to feel like they're sexual dynamos and also men not wanting to do anything but missionary sex.
And so the whole idea that Burt has is like, well, I'll just make it easier for women to orgasm from purely missionary sex.
And that will make men...
That will improve relationships because men will be sexual powerhouses then.
It's this idea of like, well, I shouldn't have to learn to pleasure my partner.
I'll alter her physiology.
Oh, my God.
Just five surgeries later.
It'll be perfect.
It was usually just one nine-hour surgery if that makes it better.
So yeah, he moved the vagina towards the clitoris.
He also pulled a significant amount of the labia minora into the vagina because he believed.
To make it pretty?
No, he thought it would cause greater stimulation during vaginal sex.
I say that he's doing all these things and he says he's getting feedback.
He's not telling these women what he's doing.
So he's not being like, so I did all this stuff to your bits.
How does it feel?
He was just like, how's sex after childbirth?
And they'd be all like, oh, it's a lot better than it was, you know, when I was pregnant.
He'd be like, oh, that means the surgery works.
He's not asking them, how about this?
How about he's not like getting, he's not even getting, not that it would be okay if he was, but he's not actually getting scientific data on this.
He's just being like, they say sex is better.
It must work.
So he doesn't know.
He's saying that I know my surgery is improving sex.
He doesn't know if it's, number one, he doesn't actually know that it's improving sex.
They might just be like, yeah, now that I don't have, you know, I'm no longer pregnant, I'm enjoying sex more, which, which could make sense.
He doesn't know if like, oh, is moving the opening or moving the clitoris or is moving the labia minora?
Like, what is it that's improving things, if any of it's having an impact?
Because he's not actually doing science.
He's just kind of futzing around down there.
Did he get any complaints?
We don't know yet.
He does.
Unscientific Surgical Claims00:06:48
Okay.
This is the 60s.
And they don't know what's being.
He's calling it love surgery, but isn't telling any of his patients.
He is not telling any of his patients at this point what he's doing.
His research is, hey, you were pregnant and now you're not.
How's the sex?
Yeah.
And it's self-reported.
So like, if he did get some complaints, he's probably not going to tell other people about that.
Exactly.
And also, like, no offense, but I'm not out here like talking to my OB being like, yeah, sex, great.
Well, yeah, especially, and that's 2021.
Like, not in the 60s.
And if you, I'm sure some, because some of these women do later go to other doctors to be like, what has happened to me?
And I'm going to guess that happened at this period, but a lot of those doctors are like, well, it's just pregnancy, you know?
Pregnancy changes stuff down there.
Leave.
Like, get out of my office, you know?
Like, there's nothing I can do for you.
This is just what happens.
What a nightmare.
Yeah, it's horrible.
It's going to get worse.
Of course, bring it off.
In 1967, James Burt finally succeeded in getting a legal divorce from his first wife so he could marry his third wife, Linda.
By this point, he was one of the most successful and thus wealthiest obstetricians in Ohio.
He and his new wife bought property in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic.
I'm sure nothing shady with either of those transactions.
They also bought a condo in Vail, Colorado, so they wouldn't have to spend as much time in the blighted hellscape that is Ohio.
Within Dayton, the Burts gained a reputation for being ostentatious and somewhat kinky rich people.
They held huge pool parties that were swimsuit optional.
James Burt wore gold chains and long fur coats in the winter.
On at least one occasion, he wore a pink safari suit at one of the parties he threw.
Are there photos?
Not that I found.
He was not particularly social with or popular among his fellow doctors.
One of his colleagues bluntly stated that James didn't enjoy golf because he, quote, preferred indoor games.
And you can translate that however you want.
Yeah.
So he's like a kind of probably kind of like a swinger dude in this period.
I'm guessing a lot of key parties at the Burt residence, you know?
Sure.
In 1973, James's third marriage fell apart.
When Linda left her husband for a ski instructor, she'd met in Veil.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes, karma is real.
Maybe.
So not really.
Because it's unclear if she left him before or after he started living with a 21-year-old.
Oh.
I know every little bit of hope.
He was 46 at the time.
In short order, he duly married this much younger woman whose name was Joan.
And they stayed together for a while.
To his credit, he did wait until after he and his third wife had a legal divorce to get married to his fourth wife.
Joan and James bought a yacht on Lake Erie.
She wore diamonds constantly.
The couple did not grow any more popular among James's colleagues.
Walter Reeling Jr., a Dayton physician who worked near Dr. Burt, later claimed that other doctors and their spouses avoided the Burts at social gatherings in the 70s.
No one, he claims, wanted to sit at a table with them.
Sarah Rodriguez writes, quote, partly this was because of the manner in which the Burts behaved at such dinners.
Both Walter Reeling and his wife Susie Reeling recollected how Joan Burt, decked out in furs, would be physically all over her husband during medical society dinners, talking a lot and bragging about how many orgasms she enjoyed.
James Burt apparently did not seek out friendships with other physicians, and Walter Reeling could not recall a physician who sought out Burt's friendship.
So, a lot of PDA that everyone finds kind of creepy, right?
Sex positive here, but if you're like sitting at a dinner talking about how often you orgasm at like a professional dinner with your colleagues, kind of weird.
Kind of weird.
Kind of weird.
That's not the time for that kind of conversation, you know?
There are times.
But he's an OB.
This is related to work.
Yeah, like, does he think he's like Jordan Belfort and like the wolf of Wall Street, the wife with the diamonds on the yacht?
He's got strong Jordan Belfort energy.
That's literally what I'm like, dog.
Come on, bro.
By the mid-1970s, Dr. Burt had added yet another step to his love surgery.
Some of his patients had complained of pain during sex after his operation.
No.
He decided the moat.
Yeah.
Oh, no, yeah.
Wow.
Now, obviously, it couldn't be that his operation was a bad idea.
It had to be that there was yet another problem with female anatomy that needed to be corrected.
He decided the most likely culprit was the pubococcygeus muscle, which is a constrictor muscle at the rear wall of the vagina that supports the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, bowel, bladder, and vagina.
This is the organ that you control when you do kegels, right?
That's the muscle that he decides is the problem.
It is extremely important.
It provides control not over just vaginal feeling, but urination and defecation.
It's a very important muscle to have.
James cut it because he decided it was getting hit during penetrative intercourse and causing pain, which made it harder for his patients to orgasm.
Again, none of them told him to do this, nor was he carrying out medical research to determine if the pubococcygeus muscle was in fact interfering with sexual pleasure.
He just sort of assumed it was the culprit and in his words, decided to, quote, cut the damn muscle.
Oh my God.
Pretty bad.
Like, yeah, I come real easy, but cannot stop wetting myself and shitting everywhere.
Yeah.
Which might have an impact on, I don't know, a lot of things.
It wasn't like he's not totally severing it, but he's severing it enough that it does cause problems with incontinence and stuff for a lot of his patients.
We'll talk about that later.
So later on, once knowledge of his love surgery was public, many of his patients would come forward with complaints that love surgery had made them incontinent.
We don't know what percentage of them suffered this way because in the mid-70s, he still was not telling anyone what he was doing.
This was now 20 years into his experiments with love surgery.
Yeah, so we don't know what percentage of his patients suffered incontinence as a result of the surgery because in the mid-1970s, he still wasn't telling anyone what he was doing.
And this is now 20 years into his experimenting with love surgery.
Bert, of course, claims to have heard almost universally positive reports from his patients about their post-childbirth sex lives.
By 1975, he claims to have performed his love surgery on more than 4,000 women.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That's some good shit.
It's not.
It's terrible.
It's some bad shit.
Yeah, that's a lot.
That's a lot of people getting surgery that absolutely did not suffer.
Ohio Audience Reaction00:04:20
Ohio is my hometown.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is a town worth of.
That's most of Ohio, I have to assume.
But you know what isn't most of Ohio?
I don't even know where.
Go ahead.
I mean, Ohio does advertise on our show.
That's what I was going to say.
We could get an Ohio ad, and like, you could be factually wrong.
And for the record, if there's an Ohio ad, don't listen to it.
Do not move to Ohio under any circumstances.
Yeah, no idea why Ohio.
Get on out of there.
Like, Ohio.
Know your audience.
This is a firmly anti-Ohio.
Profoundly.
You're wasting your money here in Ohio.
Yeah.
I mean, less money for Ohio is a win for the whole world, but still, I just don't want anyone to move there.
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All right, we're back.
So yeah, Dr. James Burt is a liar, obviously.
So we should take his claims that he performed a surgery on more than 4,000 women with a grain of salt because there's not documentation of this.
But he was one of the most, if not the most popular obstetricians in Dayton in his day.
So he, it's a lot.
He experimented probably in the low thousand, probably at least a couple thousand.
4,000 is probably an exaggeration.
He's a narcissist, but 2,000's not out of the possibility, you know?
He's been at it for like a decade, right?
20 years.
Yeah.
He's done this a lot.
And he was one of the most successful obstetricians in the whole Midwest at this point.
I think the average salary of a doctor in this period is like $62,000 a year, which is really good money in, you know, the 1960s, 70s.
He's making like 400 grand a year.
Holy shit.
He's extremely successful.
His office was on the top floor of a stylish downtown building.
He had eight exam rooms and a waiting room, which included a couch shaped like a woman's mouth.
A little bit creepy.
It must be said that he was very popular with his patients.
Dr. Burt was charming, friendly, and said to have exceptional bedside manner.
He listened to his patients in an era in which male doctors were generally expected to ignore the complaints and fears of their female patients.
One nurse later recalled that he, quote, communicated with women when a lot of doctors wouldn't.
There were a lot of physicians that were patting women on the head and saying, now, sweetie, don't worry, I'll take care of it.
And Dr. Burt was not that kind.
He would explain to you what he was.
He wouldn't tell you what he was actually doing, but he would explain to you what he was claiming he was going to do.
He would make you feel good about handing over all the power.
He would make you feel listened to before performing a surgery on you that you did not ask for and did not know was even a thing that could be done.
Patients would often claim his office was a refuge.
Dr. Burt would listen to their fears about childbirth and sexual dysfunction, which was not a subject most doctors would even broach.
Sarah Rodriguez writes, Bert seemed to sympathize with his patients.
Bert's sympathetic ear perhaps appealed to many women as he listened to their worries and fears about their upcoming labors or hysterectomies.
And he seems to have believed that he was acting sympathetically toward them by performing love surgery in addition to delivering their child or performing a hysterectomy.
In his view, Bert surgically altered their bodies to alleviate their concerns and problems, all of which, regardless of what the women may have been telling or not telling him, he felt were essentially about sex.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
So, Dr. Burt, of course, performed his love surgery after nearly every childbirth, even on women who never complained to him about having sexual problems.
He performed his love surgery after vaginal hysterectomies too, and regularly when performing abdominal uterus suspension.
So he was just, he stopped just doing this after episiotomies after.
You get a surgery and you get a surgery and you get a surgery.
And like, again, is not an OB surgeon, right?
Like, I feel like that needs to be stated over and over again.
That is not his, like, he's not trained.
Yeah, I mean, he's trained.
He's not board certified.
Like, you get training, I guess.
Like, he's not trained.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's, this is not the thing he should be doing.
At the time, it is not illegal for him to be doing this, which is a flaw in, I think, the medical system in this period.
What the hell?
Yeah, as a general rule, if a patient with a vagina was unconscious in front of him, he would do his love surgery.
That was kind of his like, do not.
Don't get drunk around this guy.
Definitely don't.
Christ, man.
One thing that endeared him to his patients were his promises.
What?
What?
Endearing him.
Yeah, he was extremely popular during this period.
Sophie, all you have to do is listen to women.
But he's, yeah, like he's meeting the lowest bar, which is he's not like patting them on the head and saying, they're there, girl.
This is like, this is adult time.
Like, that's what a lot of male doctors do, and he doesn't.
He sits there and he listens and he takes it seriously.
And then he does whatever it is he wants.
He's not, he's a monster.
Yeah, I hear you.
Let me, let me, let me cut you up real quick.
Like, what the?
All right.
Yeah, he's, I mean, yes, but like, it is important to the story that he's popular during this period.
That's part of why he gets so many women to experiment on as he's extremely popular.
Oh, we know.
And extremely successful.
You can look up his face.
I don't want to.
There's pictures of him.
Yeah, you know, he's, he's, like, it's important that he was so endearing to his patients because that's why they trusted him.
And that's why so few of them initially like recognized that something was awry.
He was very popular in part for his promises of pain-free childbirth, which he accomplished by giving expectant mothers huge doses of drugs that rendered them unconscious throughout the whole process.
This was not uncommon for the time, and it gave Bert the ability to more easily do whatever he wanted with his patients, who were again canvases to him.
By this point, he had come to believe that all female bodies needed fixing because they were badly designed for heterosexual missionary position sex, which he considered the only normal sex act.
He believed he was justified in performing his surgery on every vagina he got his hands on because he did not see his surgery as elective.
Instead, he was correcting a malformation.
He thought of it in the same way as like a doctor who corrects a cleft palate, right?
That's what's going on in this guy's head.
Sometimes he would even lie to his patients for a chance to get in there and root around.
From the New York Times, quote, Miss Phillips was one of the many women who went to Dr. Burt for a relatively minor physical problem.
She was told she needed a hysterectomy because her fallopian tubes were rotting.
Now she suffers chronic infections, extreme difficulty urinating, and excruciating pain if she attempts intercourse.
The strain eventually destroyed her marriage, she said.
Seven hours of surgery completely changed her life.
I feel like a freak, Miss Phillips said.
I can't date.
I can't ride horses.
I can't urinate.
She characterized surgery as a form of sexual abuse and said, he stole parts of my body.
Which is fair.
Yeah.
That is not.
There's no jokes even.
That's so sad.
No, there's not a joke.
It's a nightmare.
It's a horrible, horrible man who did horrible things in the name of medicine to women who trusted him implicitly.
Trust no one, women.
Trust no one.
Certainly not a gynecologist who wears fur coats.
That auto would be a warning sign.
Gynecologists who worked in and around Dr. Burt knew about his surgery and recognized it because they would often examine his former patients.
Joy Martin, who was a woman he performed his surgery on after delivering her son in 1974, said, Doctors would say, Dr. Burt's done surgery on you, hasn't he?
Yeah, because like they would see, like she would go in with, she went in with complaints and was like, what's it feels like something's wrong?
And they'd be like, oh, yeah, you had Dr. Burt.
He switched the holes.
I don't know.
They knew what he was doing.
It is important to note that while James Burt went much further than any of his colleagues, he was not alone in his obsession with making female bodies better suited for heterosexual intercourse.
Joseph DeLee, an early 20th century obstetrician who helped popularize the episiotomy, recommended this surgery and its subsequent repair because it could tighten the vagina and quote restore women to virginal conditions.
In the 1970s, author and childbirth expert Suzanne Arms would argue that the real reason for this procedure was to increase the ability of husbands to enjoy sex after childbirth.
In other words, Dr. Burt and his colleagues frame their various tightening surgeries as being done for women, but their real purpose was to make things more enjoyable for men.
By the mid-1970s, public discussion of loose post-childbirth vaginas had become common in popular culture.
In 1974, in his best-selling book, How to Get More Out of Sex, psychiatrist David Rubin urged mothers to get vaginal tightening surgery, calling it a simple procedure that could make a woman of 40 almost the same sexually as a girl of 18.
No, that's pretty problematic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not that's like on the news.
Where is that at?
Yeah, that is a book, How to Get More Out of Sex by psychiatrist David Rubin.
Like, that's a mainstream pop psychiatrist being like, get tightened up so you'll be like a teenager.
Men love teenagers.
You know, it's pretty bad.
He claimed surgery could turn back the clock and turn post-birth vaginas from the Carl's bad caverns and back into, and I'm so sorry that I had to read this phrase.
Poetic.
And back into the penis's little grotto of pleasure.
Oh my fucking God.
David Rubin, everybody.
Pretty bad.
Pretty bad.
Bad and bad.
Bad and bad, for sure.
So divorce rates started to raise during the 1970s.
And in 1976, a cosmopolitan article noted that popular myth blamed some of this on loose vaginas.
It argued that one way to keep a couple from splitting up was to, quote, tighten up the vagina in order to enhance the pleasure of intercourse.
This article also explicitly urged women to get surgery, saying that while Kegels could help, they were unlikely to go far enough.
You wouldn't hesitate to go to a doctor for surgery in a faulty appendix, so why hesitate when the happiness of your sexual life may be at stake?
It's pretty bad.
Now, I want to note that an awful lot of mothers got variations on this surgery on their own recognizance and had wonderful experiences.
It's still not an uncommon thing to do after childbirth today, and I'm not condemning the practice, just pointing out the extremely sexist way in which it was presented and in which men tended to urge it, because that's important context for why Dr. Burt didn't really think he was doing anything people would have issues with.
By the late 1970s, he'd started circumcising his patients' clitorises in order to expose more of the organ and make it more easily stimulated by sexual intercourse.
From the love surgeon, quote, doctors understood the sexual nature of the clitoris and its importance to female sexual pleasure, and thus some blamed the clitoris for a woman's failure to orgasm with her husband.
The removal of the clitoral hood was an attempt to fix this concern.
Beginning in the late 19th century, at a time when the espousal of female orgasm during marital sex was increasingly seen as an important component of a healthy marriage, physicians performed female circumcision to help married women who wanted, or whose husbands wanted their wives to have, orgasms during vaginal sex.
This is also very important.
Without understanding this, it might actually look like Dr. Burt, by performing love surgery, was showing more care for the sex lives of his patients than the men urging them to tighten up to avoid divorce.
His surgery was focused on giving women more orgasms, but for a profoundly selfish reason, so their husbands would feel like they were good at sex without needing to do foreplay or, God forbid, perform oral sex.
See, all of the improvements Dr. Burt made weren't actually correcting deficiencies in the vagina.
They were correcting deficiencies with standard missionary sex.
Many women, maybe even most women, won't regularly orgasm from simple missionary sex alone.
This is why foreplay and oral sex and other fucking positions are good things to try.
Dr. Burt thought all of that was abnormal and thus bad, right?
The whole goal is for them to come from this, right?
From the kind of sex that lazy men in the 60s most want to give them.
How's he going to be a missionary style swinger, though?
That's what I want to do.
I don't know that he was a swinger.
I'm guessing, right?
Maybe he was not.
Okay.
Those people should have exposed him to some more positions.
That's all.
Yeah.
He seems like the kind of guy who was bad enough at sex that he had to perform a legal surgery in order to please somebody, you know?
It's not great.
It's not great.
I love when men are like, no, It's not me.
It's not me.
It has to be the surgery.
There's no way to bend over and stroke it this way.
Jesus Christ, man.
There's not a whole family of tools that have been invented to aid me in this endeavor.
There's not a whole wide variety of things.
Like, if I can't please you in the laziest way possible, it's time for serious multi-hour long surgery.
By the mid-1970s, James Burt felt that he had finally perfected his surgery.
He was ready to share it with the world.
So in 1975, he and his wife Joan co-authored a book together.
Yeah, they wrote a book.
They wrote a book.
Joan was fully drinking the Kluid, but she didn't know any better because she was fucking 25 years younger.
Yeah, yeah, it's not great.
The book was titled, I apologize for this too, Surgery of Love.
Now, this was not a medical manual.
It was more of a pop medical text that functioned primarily as an advertisement for his love surgery.
It is, I feel comfortable saying, one of the most offensive documents ever published.
In part two, we'll talk about what it said.
But that is going to be the end of the episode for today.
Courtney, how are you feeling?
Shook.
One word.
Just, this is a whole, this is, he sucks.
He sucks.
And also, you have to be so careful who you entrust your pussy to.
And I feel like that still stands today forever.
Yeah, it does.
You want to plug any pluggables?
Yeah, Court.
I have a podcast about sex.
We talk about pleasurable sex on my podcast.
Private parts unknown.
So if you need a little pick-me-up after this, go check it out.
Yeah, check that out and check out, I don't know, the history of surgical abuse and problems with consent and medicine.
Pleasurable Sex Talk00:02:36
Check that out on our next episode, actually.
Woo!
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