“5 Things We Can Each Do To Make Social Media And The Internet A Kinder And More Tolerant Place”, With Dr. Lanae St.John

The recipient of online critique might feel like the walls are crashing in on them or that their world is ending. They might feel unworthy of love or alone. Brene Brown says shame is highly correlated with things like violence, aggression, and bullying, among other things. It’s possible that the people doing the bullying are feeling shame about something themselves and are lashing out. Hurt people tend to hurt other people.

As a part of my interview series about the things we can each do to make social media and the internet a kinder and more tolerant place, I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Lanae St.John, aka The MamaSutra. Dr. Lanae St.John is a board-certified sexologist, Sexuality Educator and Coach, former professor, and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Outside of her private practice, her work has been featured in O ~ Oprah Magazine, Forbes, the Huffington Post, Livestrong, Popsugar and Women’s Health Magazine. For more, visit her website and follow her on Twitter.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

I grew up as a Midwestern girl, raised in Des Moines, Iowa in a Catholic, Republican household with a Native American mother and a (mostly) Irish father. In our house, we didn’t talk about sex. Sex was dangerous. Something to be talked about only in whispers or not at all.

As a result, I was pretty sheltered. I didn’t have any boyfriends nor did I really date. The line I parroted during high school was that I was “too busy to date.” The problem was the adults around me fed wrong-minded tropes and phrases to influence me. Ideas like “Boys only want one thing”, “you have to be a virgin until marriage”, “men won’t want to buy the cow if they can get the milk for free”, and “marriage is the happy ending” were all meant to control my behavior. I began to…