Trailer: Is sleep the new sex?
In this episode: We begin with introductions and a land acknowledgement, then Joshua asks Cressida who they are (a tendentious question for a philosopher) and how they got interested in “the cultural politics of sleep” (2:47). They discuss why “Sleep is the New Sex” (6:30), what the “politics” of sleep refers to (12:08), the cultural life of sleep and its technologies (18:18), side-track into dreaming (21:27), and offer a preview of upcoming episode topics (26:47).
Mentioned in this episode: French philosopher Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality; Simon Williams on “sleep-negative discourse;” Thomas Edison’s views on sleep; Elon Musk’s views on weekends; Sleepy Joe Biden trope (@ 4:00); Margaret Thatcher’s sleep rhetoric; Inception-themed lucid dreaming app; Freud’s view of dreams.
Apotheosis=the perfect form or example of something.
Transcript
Welcome to season one of Sleep is the New Sex, a podcast about the cultural obsession with sleep and what it tells us about work, rest, gender, sexuality, and being human. My name is Cressida Heyes. I'm a philosopher and political theorist at the University of Alberta and your host for this podcast series.
And I am your co-host, Joshua Ayer. I'm a PhD student, also at the University of Alberta, studying post-work and the politics of productivity. I am myself, someone who never figured out how to sleep, and only until recently averaged a brisk four hours of sleep at night.
So, I have a personal stake in this series, I'm sure like many of our listeners, and I'm so excited to learn more about the topic.
This series is recorded at the University of Alberta, which is located on the territory of the Nehiyaw, Nitsatapi, Métis, Nakota, Dene, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe, lands that are now known as part of Treaty 6, 7 and 8, and homeland of the Métis. As we talk about the history and meanings that sleep, rest, leisure and productivity have for us, we also want to recognize the way each of these ideas participates in the history of colonialism that is shaped and continues to shape relations between settlers and First Nations.
Each episode of this podcast will address a different topic. So whether you're joining us at the start or somewhere else along the way, you've come at the right time. With that said, do be sure to check out any past episodes you might have missed. You'll find the themes also overlap in surprising ways.
Our sound engineer is Tom Merklinger, who also wrote and performed our music. To find our first season, please see the link in the show notes. And for more information on this project, visit sleepisthenewsex.ca.
We could just start with a super basic question. Who are you and a bit of background about where you learned your discipline(s)?
Yeah. I'm Cressida Heyes, and I have degrees in politics, philosophy, economics, and then another one in politics, then another one in philosophy.
So l identify myself usually as a philosopher and political theorist to people who want that kind of academic background.
And I've done a lot of very wide-ranging work. And as your question implies, it's interdisciplinary in a way that is, you know, sounds good, but also means that I get to try to learn too many things and traverse too many different disciplines in some ways. So this project, Sleep is the New Sex, is the apotheosis of all of that kind of interdisciplinary scholarship because it's trying to take a single theme and bring as much different kind of disciplinary knowledge to it as possible. But it's also trying to talk about sleep in a context that's not just for academics, but for people with a general interest in the cultural politics of sleep.
The cultural politics of sleep. So what for you does that mean for a general audience?
So I'm not so much interested in sleep medicine, although I do read some of the medical literature and I appreciate that sleep is properly a topic of medicine as well. I'm interested in how sleep is represented and experienced. Those two things. It is amazing once you start going with it, how many different representations of sleep there are in the cultural worlds that we inhabit. And we're going to talk about a bunch of them during the course of the podcast. And it's also amazing how important sleep is to people. You don't have to know anything about sleep medicine to know that it's important and to experience sleep disorders, sleep deprivation.
So I find that sleep is like sex in the sense that people are worried about it, they want to talk about it. There's a lot of discussion about it. It's kind of everywhere. And so I think it's political because if you get sleep, how much sleep they get, whether they feel okay about what's happening, is something that involves relations of power and tells us something about how our society is structured. And it's cultural because it's all through the culture. It's in books and films and art and just media coverage. Everyday rhetoric, it's everywhere you look. That's cultural politics.
Do you have a favorite example of an artifact or a thing that represents that cultural politics really well?
Many. I would say that the experience in my own life that made me start thinking more about sleep was having a baby. Having a baby who didn't sleep really didn't sleep very well and very much. And feeling like, whoa, I was told that babies would sleep. This does run in our family. So I did sort of know that it was unlikely that I would have a baby that slept well. But it was just so profoundly exhausting. And I really thought, okay, sleep deprivation is shattering of the self. That level of sleep deprivation makes you kind of incapable of functioning, but in a way of being a self, of being the person that you thought you were before. And that's a pretty common experience, I think. I talked to other parents and it was really desperate for lots of people, even though I still maintain that my baby was worse. But lots of us were in a bad way.
So the project and the podcast is called Sleep is the New Sex.
And I'm sure many people listening will want to know why Sleep is the New Sex, or what that title means. Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah, I thought I was the first person to think of it, and maybe I was because I thought of it many years ago. But it sort of appeared in other places, and I don't know what other people mean exactly. But I mean something like, I used to teach theories of sexuality, philosophies of sexuality, and students were a bit recalcitrant, a bit embarrassed, a bit reluctant to talk about sexuality in the classroom, but also on some level very eager to do it. So it was very, very important to them personally, but they lacked a sort of vernacular for doing it. And there was a lot of anxiety about it. In the broader culture, maybe other people are doing it better, or they're getting more of it, or, you know. And I don't think there are very many people in their undergraduate years who approach the study of sexuality that way anymore. It seems, if anything, a bit passe. But when I started talking about sleep in class, really parenthetically at the beginning, it had that same feeling that sex did in the 90s. It was what everybody wanted to talk about, but they also didn't know exactly how to talk about it. They were a bit worried that maybe they weren't doing it right and that would have consequences. Maybe other people did know and they could find out from other people how to sleep right.
I guess the thesis is that sleep replaced sex, not literally or directly, but just the way that we speak about it. Lots and lots of cultural anxiety. But also, maybe this is a bit nerdy.
There is, I think, what Foucault called an “incitement to discourse” about sleep. But he said it about sex. So that we have this idea about the history of sexuality, that sexuality was repressed.
And especially, he says, when we talk about Victorian sexuality, we talk about how prudish they were and how repressed they were. And we love that as a sort of interpretation of contemporary texts, but also a way of imagining ourselves to be superior, because we're liberated. But actually, he says that the way that this talk functions is just to keep on generating, proliferating talk of sex.
But ironically, by saying that we don't talk about it, he comes up with lots of examples of the way people talked about actually it, being incredibly lascivious and detailed. And there were these erotic diaries and all sorts of things where people just really waxed lyrical about sex, but often with a self-consciousness that they were doing something transgressive, because everybody was really repressed. And so the incitement to discourse is that way of speaking. It's that way of being like, I know I'm not supposed to be mentioning this, but I'm going to tell you about that time I did unspeakable things with a scullery maid. (That's actually one of the examples.)
That's a classic example.
And so I think that there's something about the way we talk about sleep that has a similar incitement to discourse. That people are saying, you know, we should really talk about sleep. It's terrible that we don't think about it. It's a basic human function. And we really need to be thinking about this more. And I'm like, are you kidding? Talk of sleep is absolutely everywhere.
Like, it's just the culture is packed with it. But it often has this flavor of I'm going to talk about it.
And I'm like the first person to do it. And so, you know, you're not. You're the 10 millionth person to do it.
And so that analogy is kind of important to me as well, because it signals something about cultural preoccupation that needs to be explained.
Right. I wonder if when you started talking about sleep with the students, did you expect that reaction from them?
No, I didn't.
So you were surprised by their anxiety around talking about it.
Yes.
Interesting.
I think because it was parenthetical, it wasn't really the topic of what I was teaching at the beginning. And I think maybe I have a prejudice that young people sleep well, which is, I have learned, not at all true.
No.
But yeah, I was really struck by how with many of my students, they were thinking about work and sleep. Because like post-secondary students all over the world, they don't just pursue their education, they mostly work paid jobs at the same time. And so the juggling of work and study for many of them had had serious implications for their sleep.
Like they just weren’t sleeping enough or they were suffering from insomnia because they were anxious about getting things done and how much they had to do and just how busy they were, how much of their time was taken up. Sleep was a big problem and something we really need to think about.
So, cultural politics of sleep. Let's maybe deal with each of those terms on their own first. Do you have a particular example of how sleep becomes political or maybe how politics becomes sleepy?
Well, sleep is obviously political. I mean, you can be very literal about it and say, it's inequitably distributed. So if you look at gender as an axis of social stratification or race, you can see that women certainly are more likely to have their sleep interrupted and that's largely because of caregiving responsibilities.
So the people who look after other people who need care 24-7 are most likely to be women, whether they're doing it for their own children or elders, or whether because they're doing it as paid work, as nannies or nurses or home care aides, or people who work in elder homes. There's lots of jobs, all of which are very feminized, which doesn't mean only women do them, but it means that the large majority of people doing them are women, and they are assumed to be feminine jobs in various ways. Those are the roles, whether they're paid or not, that interrupt your sleep.
And so that explains, I think, a fair bit of the difference that women and men face in sleep. Other stuff like hormonal, or there's certainly medical reasons why women and men sleep differently. Men are more likely to have sleep apnea, which wakes you up.
Yes.
It's a really serious sleep disorder, and usually people who have sleep apnea snore. So the snoring man is kind of a trope, right? But the snoring man is, he should be worried about his own health because sleep apnea is very bad for you. And if he has a female partner, he's probably waking her up with his snoring.
Most likely.
Yes. Or even with interrupted breathing. And that's a whole story that gets repeated in the medical anthropology literature about sleep, of women being woken up by snoring men.
So there's a gender gap there. There are race gaps in sleep, like people who are racialized sleep less, they sleep less well. And there's interesting reasons for that.
I mean, why does racism do what it does? We could talk about that for a whole other podcast, but why some people don't seem to be getting the sleep that they need, and that's organized around differences that we know are the source of other kinds of injustice, I think is important to think about. But sleep is political in ways that are a bit more indirect.
And so, an example l've talked about a lot in other work is the way that hustle and grind culture, or what the sociologist, Simon Williams, calls sleep negative discourse, has all of these implications for who's working and how they're working, and the idea that sleep is for the weak, and that you can somehow hustle your way through lack of sleep to success. And that's a longstanding idea, especially in American culture, often represented by people who have opportunities that others might not. So, if you're Thomas Edison, who is a famous historical example, you know, he thought that nobody should sleep more than four hours a night, and you should just get by on naps.
And not just him, but everyone, including all of his employees. And so he sold that as a lifestyle that would enable you to be an entrepreneurial successful businessman. And he was a very successful entrepreneurial businessman, but not everybody who worked in his factories was, or even could be. And we see it today. Just recently, Elon Musk went into Doge, went into the government and said, oh, look, let's get beds set up here. We can hustle our way through government reform: “These guys go home on the weekend. It's like your opponent leaves the field for two days.” That's a direct quote.
That's right.
And so for him taking the weekend, which is something that we've had for less than 100 years, the two-day weekend (and it's a result of labor activism) is a sign of weakness, you know, that you're not playing the game as hard as you can. And so he gets to with his superior work ethic, he gets to take advantage.
You know, the politics of sleep, I would prefer would be just to tell him to go home and take, take his own weekend and sleep, you know, because people who hustle and grind at that level also tend to have to do uppers, even if it's only a lot of caffeine. And I don't know that any of that promotes the best judgment or the best work. Anyway, I think that that's an example of sleep being political, trying to sell us a relationship to sleep that's not in our own interests.
And what about politics getting sleepy?
Oh, yeah, I don't, I keep thinking about how Trump used to and still occasionally does call Biden, Sleepy Joe Biden.
Yeah.
And he made cracks about him being an old man who just hung out in his basement. You know?
Yeah.
The idea that he wasn't sufficiently energetic.
Or weak.
Yes. Yeah. Sort of insufficiently conscious to be a world leader. I sometimes think, well, what's so bad about being a politician who sleeps?
Yeah.
I remember in the 80s, we were all sort of sold on the myth of Margaret Thatcher by being told she only sleeps four to five hours a night. And she is a very masculine stereotype, and she really appropriated it. Like she was like, look, I can be just as overworked as the next man. And this idea that you can use your time profitably and get more done if you sleep less, is sort of powerful in making those people seem like good leaders, you know?
Yeah.
What about a leader who says, well, actually, I need nine hours and I make no bones about it. I think they might seem a bit weak. Like it would be a risk to say something like that if you were a politician.
Turning now to the other side, to a culture of sleep or the cultural significance of sleep. I'm wondering if you have a favorite sleep thing or a favorite example of that.
There are so many layers to it. Like there are the sort of obvious technologies of sleep, like alarm clocks and apps, apps, apps, apps everywhere. Just nothing but apps for sleep. And of course, there are weighted blankets and fancy pillows and all of the accoutrements of sleep. But there are also things that people associate with sleep, like your teddy bear or something. And so just the idea that there are things, material objects, that are connected to sleep, and that they have connected to sleep, and that they have different kinds of significance for us, 1 think, is a way of thinking about how sleep goes through our culture.
For a long while, I wanted to write about mattresses.
Such a good sleep object.
Because they're so amazing. Like the history of mattresses is itself interesting.
They used to be just sort of piles of horse hair or straw.
Right. And really must have been pretty uncomfortable and full of bugs.
Yeah.
so, you know.
And disease.
Yes. The medieval mattress, unless you were super rich, looks very, very uncomfortable.
Right.
And then they've modernized so much.
Now, you can customize your mattress to your body size, weight, sleeping orientation, you know.
Oh, yeah.
You can have one that folds in the middle, that you press a button and it sits you up, all of that stuff. You can spend a fortune.
Yes.
On a mattress, an absolute fortune. And there's also a low end of the market too.
Like when I first moved into the house I live in now, I got a mattress and it was one of those mattresses in a box.
But it arrived and it was in a surprisingly small package considering it was a king size mattress. And I thought this is the most incredible thing. Like I've managed to have a mattress delivered and I've hooked it up the stairs to my bedroom and this is amazing.
And then I opened it.
Yeah.
And I can't describe the feeling of fear. It was like this thing just expanded to become a full king size mattress that I could not possibly now lift by myself.
Right.
It was just this, it just got bigger and bigger as it was extracted from its vacuum packing. And it made me think about mattresses in a new way. Just getting those things up and down the stairs, finding someone to take them to the dump. It's just such a hassle. That's the reason I have such an old mattress on my bed now. I went back to a coil mattress and it's really old and it needs to be replaced. But they're just the most incredibly difficult sleep things to move around.
But anyway, I don't know how erudite that is, but that's my mattress story.
Love it.
Do you have a favorite sleep thing?
I'm glad you asked. My favorite sleep thing is an early, early phone app and it was released around the film that is also a great sleep film, Inception, which came out when I was in middle school. I knew that would be a very dating statement to make, but I-
Dating in a flattering way.
Sure. Yeah, it was the perfect time to see that kind of mind-blowing movie, right?
It just completely took over my imagination.
But this app that was released alongside it was supposed to help you lucid dream and I had no idea if it was effective because I was a kid for my whole life who had insomnia. So, in order to experience and use the lucid dreaming app, I would first have to have fallen asleep, but I could never get past step one. So, I never got to experience and know if this lucid dreaming app worked
But the idea that you could fall asleep and then basically just fly around or be aware that you were dreaming and then change stuff in your dreams was this fantastical idea for me. And it also gets to this idea of what are dreams for, what is sleep for. I think the appeal of lucid dreaming is this sort of, you're not just wasting your time, but you're turning this time when you're asleep into this almost productive or exciting time, or it's this thing that you still get to be active and an agent in.
And that's an idea that I think we're going to come back to a few times in the series.
Yeah. But don't you think it's a bit hubristic to want to like...
Play God in your dreams?
Well, to be like, you know, I'm going to make good use of every moment, even of my dreams, and I'm going to be in charge of them. Like, it seems to me that sort of the point of dreams is that they're something that comes out of the unconscious and that they can't be directed in the way that you want. You know, that that's maybe what they're for is to allow your, this is very Freudian, but to allow your unconscious to manifest in your dreaming life in ways that your conscious mind can't achieve.
Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is something to analyze in wanting to take control of your dreams. I think part of what you're saying, too, is are you running the risk of, you know, impeding some sort of psychological development.
Like maybe there is something very, very important and significant to being a more passive agent or a more passive subject, where you are just experiencing what happens to you in your dreams.And maybe it's important that your brain is, you know, in a stepped back position, I guess.
Yeah, I suppose it depends what you think dreaming is. You know, if you think it's just the random firings of your brain trying to get rid of toxins during the night, then you wouldn't really mind if you lucid dreaming, as long as those toxins still got released, right? That's, I suppose.
But would they, right?
Yes, well, and I don't know. I mean, that would be, I don't know how you would even answer that question, but yeah, assuming that it wasn't interfering with the biological function of dreams, which is, of course, massively contested.
Yeah, and I think what's more interesting to me now is the appeal that controlling your dreams would have and why that would be appealing to somebody. In practice. I do wonder or worry that you would be losing something important in that process, that there is something valuable or necessary to your health and maybe psychological development to allow your brain to just purge the toxins, sort of unaffected by your own participation.
Yeah. I mean, you could believe that dreams are messages from the ancestors or something like that, in which case-You don't want to interrupt those.
No, you don't want to interrupt them.
Yeah. For some people, they are irrelevant.
I've met lots of people who say that they think they never dream, by which they mean they never remember their dreams.
Right.
And that's a bit sad, really, because I think that even if they're bad dreams, I think that they're very interesting. And I don't know, I've avoided talking too much about dreams in my project, because it is actually the sleep-related topic that has the biggest existing literature.
Of course.
Yeah. Mostly because of Freud. But anyway, lucid dreaming, a so-so idea.
Yeah. Put a pin in that. lucid dreaming: maybe, maybe not.
Yes. So we've covered some of the big ideas of this project. Why don't you say a little about what the audience can expect moving forward. As something that they can look forward to.
Okay. So we've got two episodes that should already be available to listeners if they're listening to this.
Lucky them.
Lucky them. The first one is a great conversation that we had with Paul Huebener from Athabasca University about sleep stories. So he's written a book about sleep in Canadian fiction and film and advertising.
And so we talked about the narrative function of sleep, or how sleep features in various kinds of stories. And you get to hear Joshua and I trying to sing the Sleep Country Canada jingle. And so we've also got an episode called Beauty Sleep, where we talked to Meredith Jones about the aesthetic components of sleep.
The idea of watching people asleep or using sleep to convey aesthetic desirability. Beauty Sleep, meaning get your Z's so that you can wake up youthful and refreshed. Lots of ideas in that episode.
And then the third one with Janique Tucker that will be coming two weeks later is on sleep coaching. So do we need experts to teach us how to sleep? And we're focusing in that episode on sleep coaching for parents of new babies.
And so we'll talk about what it means to be a sleep coach and to hire a sleep coach and what they do. So maybe you'll get some hot tips.
Yeah, I can't wait for that. Maybe that’s what I need: a sleep coach.
Yes. Well, we don't talk very much about that. But I do think that sleep coaching just for regular old adults with insomnia is probably the next frontier.
In fact, we're already there in that industry. So there are many episodes coming after that. We talk about cultures of fast and slow.
We talk about sleep and performance art. We talk about sleep and money. All sorts of things happening.
We are not going to run out of things to talk about, that's for sure.
No. Doing this series has convinced me of one thing. It's that the world of sleep is vast and wide.
We will not even scratch the surface of the topics that could be discussed.
No. The cultural politics of sleep isn't coming to an end anytime soon.
We're not going to put it to bed anytime soon.
Yeah. I see what you did there.
Thanks.
That's very good.
That's all for today. Thanks, Cressida, for taking us through these ideas.
Thanks, Joshua, and thanks to our audience for listening. Join us next time at Sleep is the New Sex for more ideas about our cultural obsession with sleep.
You can find us on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can always find us and show notes that reference everything that we've talked about on the podcast at our website, which is sleepisthenewsex.ca.
See you soon. This podcast is supported by the University of Alberta Political Science Department in proud partnership with the University of Alberta Library, Digital Scholarship Centre, and Sound Studies Institute. We acknowledge financial support for the academic research behind the pod from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and for this podcast from the support for the Advancement of Scholarship Fund in the Faculty of Arts and the Office of the Vice President Research and Innovation at the University of Alberta.