Kristen Bell andDax Shepard are parents to two daughters, ages 8 and 6.- On his podcast, Shepard said Bell talked openly with the girls about sex and emphasized consent.
Kristen Bell uses a turn of phrase to help emphasize sexual consent to her daughters, Lincoln, 8, and Delta, 6.
When Bell talks to the girls about the mechanics of sex, she emphasizes that the person with the vagina is in control, Bell's husband, Dax Shepard, said on a recent episode of his podcast, "Armchair Expert."
"When she describes sex to our children, she says, 'And then the woman takes the man's penis and puts it in her vagina,'" Shepard said in a conversation with the actor Gwyneth Paltrow. "So right away it's like, you're in charge of this, you will decide to put this in your vagina, not 'the man puts his penis in your vagina.' That was like, a little subtle thing like that is like, you're in the driver's seat."
Shepard said that Bell didn't come up with this phrasing but that they both decided to use it with their girls.
"I was like, that's a nice little adjustment that we're going to make," he said.
Talking sex and women's pleasure
During the podcast, Shepard talked with Paltrow about sex and pleasure. Paltrow was discussing her Netflix show, "The Goop Lab," which focuses on
Paltrow said she wanted to show vulvas and a real sex act because many women get their ideas of sex from "porn or Playboy." She said that when she was growing up there was no talk about women and sexual pleasure and that the messaging she got was: "Good girls don't go this. Good girls don't really talk about it. Don't talk about pleasure. Don't think about what you might like."
Shepard said he would want his daughters to have sex for pleasure, not because of social pressure.
"There's this notion that I've got to protect my daughters' virginity," he said, adding: "I do not want my daughters to have sex so that they can get approval from somebody, but if my daughters are horny and want to have sex, that was my favorite activity, remains my favorite activity - I'd be lying if I said I was in any way anti-that-activity. I'm anti-'getting esteem from that activity,' but that's it."
Perfectionism in parenting is not the point
Shepard and Paltrow also touched on competition among some women over birth plans or parenting choices. Paltrow, who delivered both her children by C-section, said that the pressure to give birth in the "most natural" way was overwhelming.
"It's past perfectionism. It's like, I can do this gargantuan task that's superhuman," she said. "And why? For what?"
Shepard said that when Bell was pregnant she was often asked if she was going to have a home birth or whether she would get an epidural.
He compared it to men who claim to lift the heaviest weights at the gym and said it was as if people were asking, "Are you doing the most heroic version of this possible?"
"I don't dig that pressure," he said.
Social media just adds to the pressure to give birth and parent in a certain way, Paltrow added.
"Thank God there wasn't Instagram when I had babies," she said, adding, "Now we're being fed all these other images of, like, what we're supposed to look like all the time."
Whatever their parenting and life choices, Paltrow said, women should support one another.