YouSaid · the spoken record

Polly Vernon

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-08-12
most recent: 2025-08-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“That's maybe what I'm giving people the basis for a better understanding of yourself, which will allow you to help yourself and ask for help when you need it. And it's also that, you know, that therapy thing that I spoke about earlier, that it will just, it gives you a better understanding of all of yourself, of your past. And yeah, your future, a good future into good aging.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it's, I hope that reading the book will give women and the men who are interested in supporting women. Kind of understanding that they can use to ask for help when they need it. I spoke to a very, very brilliant gynecologist called Dr. Shazia Malik, and we actually did an event together for the book afterwards. And she was saying, look, if you go to your GP and go, this is what's happening to me. This is what I believe I need. They will like that. They will, rather than use of turning up and going, I don't know, I feel wrong. And I'm not sure what. You give me answers. go with some sort of an idea of what is going on wrong with you and what might help you that that is something that GPs can work with so I suppose”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The simplicity of that is sort of gorgeously reassuring. I know it's really tedious and boring for people who want it to be more exciting than that. And there to just be some amazing piece of wearable tech that will change it all. But yeah, there we are.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, that surprised me and I knew, but I didn't know, but surprised me was the importance of women in the mid-40s, 50s going into perimenopause and menopause. You sort of need to eat more. And I think there's a real tendency for women to panic. We can become inculcent resistant in menopause, which means we put on weight. And then because this has been so drilled into us that the way to deal with that is to stop eating. We stop eating, which would actually produce cortisol, stress hormone, which because your body's panicking, which tends to mean you lay on fat around your midsection, which is really not what you're going for. So I think that sort of surprised me and struck me. And I also see, like I see it all the time. But yeah, the sort of...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The protein stuff is extraordinary. I'm like, I don't know. I don't think there's not enough chicken in the world. But no, it isn't that complicated and stepping away from that noise is really super important. So yes, I was surprised at how straightforward that is. And it's also one of those things that when you start doing it, and I have inevitably got stuck into doing that stuff, you feel better. Of course you do. Something that...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what surprised me was how consistently they came up. And I think I did sort of suspect there was something more complicated there. And we are flooded with that's nonsense, really, isn't it, from the internet about what we should be doing. And it's so complicated. I'm always scrolling through Instagram stories where people are going. This is the amount of protein you need to eat per kilogram of your body and blah, blah, blah. And it's, you know, it's sort of mind-boggling.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh absolutely, I mean again you are literally getting to know your body, buddy. You're literally becoming closer to it. And it's hard not to. incredibly fond of it. I definitely will. I kind of picked up the practice before I began working on this book of when I had, I get quite lubricated, or I used to get quite a lot of recurring back pain. I've actually weight trained my way out of it. But when something goes wrong and you feel pain in your body, you feel angry towards that thing that's not because it's causing your pain, right? I mean, I used to call my back a little bitch when it went wrong. And that doesn't help. You have to go, I'm really sorry you're in pain, that part of my body. So I think there's, yeah, there's very much compassion and sort of love and a desire to, I say show it a good time, but, you know, just, yeah, kind of work with it and be good to it because it is amazing. It's so impressive and it's trying its best for you even when it's getting it wrong. It really is trying its best for you.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also said in the book by the end of the book that what I had mainly begun to glimpse and get an understanding of was how little I knew. But that fundamental realization that it can be known, at least your own body can be known to you. And you can get tools and tactics for looking after it and managing it and coexisting with it really as well as you possibly could. That's quite beautiful. And I definitely came to understand that.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's brilliant. I mean, it's, I mean, it is magnificent, such a cliche, but it's a miracle. It's so extraordinarily well calibrated. And even when it doesn't work properly, it's trying. There's stuff it knows it should do and it is trying to do and those things that it is trying to do are extraordinary. Yeah, I think, and I think it's lovely you're used to the word rational because that is not a word that is often applied to women or their bodies or their hormones, but it is. Yeah, it's like a supercomputer. It's like the most extraordinary bit of tech. It's amazing.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't my great plan, no, but it was absolutely what happened. Again, one of those things that I worked out and realized, I think I also say that the idea of it being a car manual that I hadn't even bothered looking at, I think I thought if I did try to look at the car manual, I wouldn't understand it. And I thought that was about me. But also, as you say, this kind of general idea that it is unknowable and that our hormones are kind of like Greek gods of pulling our strings randomly. And none of that's true. And it's so comforting. I mean, I think, you know, it is a complicated machine, but it's not a mystery by any means, not if you start looking at it.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would have been a bit easier. So I think it's not about dismissing, it's about using that knowledge as a tool and just making your life a little bit easier. And, you know, whether you do it or not, whether you stay in when you're most likely to start smoking again or whether you just go sold it and go out and do it, that's entirely up to you. at least having that knowledge that's pretty empowering, I hope, I think.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of judgmental manager. It's just like, no, don't do that. You suddenly. Feel awful about yourself. Well, not as good. You look in the mirror and you're like, What was I talking about? Why did I agree to do that? I don't want to do that anymore. I want to stay in. And that's kind of Macy Hill, the expert about that. She said that that's your body working on the assumption it is pregnant and it's best for you if you stay home. So it wants you to feel less good about”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be so useful, I think. And then there were just the amount of confidence you have and how that fluctuates during the course of the mental cycle is amazing and really useful. So you will feel, and again, I'm hugely generalizing. And this is the importance of knowing yourself and tracking your own cycle and tracking your own kind of emotional ups and downs. But for a lot of women, they feel most confident in the sort of going into the top the first two weeks of their cycle. So the last few days as you hit kind of 14 days, you are flooded with estrogen. You feel amazing. You look in the mirror and you're like, I look great. You're kind of committing left, right, and centers of social events because you think you're just going to go out there, kill it, feel amazing. And then a few days later, when that eastern starts to drain away and it's replaced by progesterone, which is, I say it's like progesterone is like estrogen's kind.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lighted to take up smoking again and probably other forms of drug consumption if she hadn't done any work into that. So once you know that, if you are trying very hard to give up smoking, just don't go out and get drunk when you're ovulating. Just stay in or whack an extra nicotine patch on, you know, and that alone.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't it? But also when she told me that, I was like, that is amazing. And oh yeah, like that literally explains me from 22 to 27. She's like, why am I so drunk? I probably got spike. No, you had two glasses of chardonnay while you were obulating. And I think that, and another thing that can have a real impact, and that is funny and it's astonishing but useful potentially, we're much more likely to relapse if we're trying to give up psyching, for example. We are much more likely to relapse into smoking again when we're obligated for all the same reasons. Our body's just like, don't worry about it. You know, willpower, mind over matter is not its thing when we're ovulating getting it's quite the opposite you know it wants us to take risks it wants us to get out there and do crazy stuff and that is what having a body full of estrogen will do you'll be much more likely to get out there and kind of flirt and talk to people you wouldn't otherwise talk to because that's how hard your body is trying to get you pregnant so you're also more”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Women get much drunker in the middle of a cycle surround ovulation than we do at any other time in the month. And that's because basically your body is so desperately trying to get you pregnant, regardless of what you want. It doesn't care. It doesn't bother processing alcohol like it's, why should I?”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think absolutely. I mean, I understand that slight reticence to really look at it and talk about it because then are we just dismissing women as hormones? It's everything we feel, everything we say just about where we are in our mental cycle or about where we are in perimenopause or where we are in menopause. So I understand that it can be used against us. And it's important that it isn't. But equally, I think it's a massively useful tool that we can be aware of in ourselves. And one of the things I find out, so I spoke to a brilliant expert on addiction, Dr. Sharon Cox, and she was, she told me that.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running ovulation and that doesn't exist in men, but there is something similar that concerns itself with sperm production in men. So same part of the brain, similar function. So yes and no. Yes and no. She said if you cut your head open it wouldn't be pink as well. I think what she said.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't really me saying that. That was Sarah McCain, my neuroscientist saying that. Everything I know about brains I know from her, the way she described it was, okay, look at male and female bodies. They're basically the same, right? Loosely men are going to be taller, but not invariably. And she talks about, I think it was her sister who was really, really tall. And, you know, we've all got fingernails and we've all got hair. You know we are the same thing. But there are points of difference. And I think it's the same might be applied. That's what she was saying. The same can be applied to the brain. So largely they're the same thing. But you need to be very, very specific about what you're asking. So there is, for example, a part of the brain, which is uniquely concerned with running the uterus. So, you know,”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's so hot, doesn't it? That's that idea that, okay, manage your stress better. What am I going to do? Am I going to meditate? I mean, actually, I do meditate and dusting to help. But it's so difficult in this life that we lead to manage it. And of course, because we know the workload and the emotional load on women tends to be far, far greater than it is on men. I mean, I feel like a bit of a cheat when I talk about that because I don't have any kids. So I just have one quite demanding dog and the pretty equal relationship with my partner in terms of the workload. But I see it in my friends all the time. You know, it just is the way it happens. They end up taking on more than their fair share. And that makes life difficult for them. Which has real health consequences”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, I think that the work that I did on this book made me think about stress in a different way. I think I thought of it as a sort of, I don't know, a vague notion as opposed to an actual really quite dangerous quantity. It's my weak point. So I'm really good at sleep. I'm really good at exercise. I'm pretty good at...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've been out working. We have better connections with the world. We are sort of more involved in the world. We do more things. The more equal a society is, the more gender equality there is in the society, the healthier the women's brains are, which is sort of extraordinary. But yeah, there is, again, really good reason to be hopeful that that inequality will start writing itself.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fascinating, right? It is, I find it completely fascinating. The Alzheimer's thing is amazing. So women are diagnosed twice at twice the rate of men. And one of the reasons for that is that we live slightly longer. So there's more of us tossing around, I think. My neuroscientist said to have it. But that doesn't explain all of it. And there is some magnificent research. I think it's Lisa Musconi's lab are looking into about whether or not HRT helps is preventative as neuroprotective prevents women's brains against developing Alzheimer's, which would suggest that it's about the estrogen draining away in menopause. There's just some incredible research generally which shows that women of my generation will have lower rates of it than the women in the generation above us purely because our lives are more equal.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shift in the other way, which is probably an overcorrection, and that depression, anxiety are being diagnosed with perimenopause and menopause when they're not. So I think that's, and then maybe there is just something about estrogen that makes us more anxious. There are so many questions there. And everyone I spoke to refused to be defensive about it, which isn't entirely fair enough.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internalize their pain, whereas boys, younger boys tend to externalize it. So younger boys tend to, it becomes aggression, aggressive behavior towards other people for girls and young women. It's effectively aggressive behavior towards themselves. It's oppression. We compare ourselves negatively with each other much more. But then I have, you know, since writing the book, that's probably right, but then you have a load of conversations with people that make you sort of shift your perspective a bit. It could be that some things that are assumed to be mental health issues in women are actually medical, but it's the easy place to go to. It's the whole hysteria thing, you know, women are just more emotional. Our wounds make us hysterical. So I think it's probably there's a bit of truth in all of that. Definitely until recently symptoms of perimenopause and menopause tended to be misdiagnosed, suppression, anxiety. I think now we've seen...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a big old question. No, I mean, it's fascinating. And with women's mental health issues and depression, anxiety and women are diagnosed much more frequently than they are in men. And I think there's just a terrible fact that men are more likely to commit suicide. Women are more likely to try. We don't succeed. So it's not, it is that I sort of, I think I thought men's mental health must be worse than women's because of that suicide rate, but it's actually not. The psychiatrist I spoke to, Tara Porter, I mean, A, it could be a question of diagnoses. Women go for help, we're much more engaged with the medical system, we're better at talking. So it could be that we present more openly with mental health issues, though it does also seem to be about the way, particularly younger women, that's where it all starts and girls.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. I mean, it's that there is nothing it's not good for. But, you know, I still, I have conversations with women all the time who, and the first thing they say is, will I bulk up? Will I bulk up? And I'm like, well, if you do, brilliant. But no, it's really, really hard for women to bulk up. We aren't built like that and you have to train incredibly hard. And a huge amount of protein. I mean, I train at my local boxing gym and the women there are hench. They look amazing. But the way they train, it doesn't just happen to you. You know, you don't just get those bodies, which I think are just mesmerizingly beautiful, but you do not just get those bodies by lifting up a dumbbell. You really, really don't. But yeah, I hope that understanding is changing. I really do. So important.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That looks intimidating, that looks like something men do, going into that area of the gym just feels terrifying. And on top of which women are told, and it seems to have got worse again, we are told that we should be sort of thin and flimsy and waf-like, not muscular. I nearly swore then. That's so not true. The need to be masculine is, I mean, I can't state it enough. It's so important. But I think women are really nervous of it. And that appalls me”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I say in the book it is as non negotiable as not smoking. It is that basic and fundamental to how our bodies operate and how they age. Because women start losing muscle mass at 30, right? So it starts seeping away from us at 30. And we need to get it back on. We need to put it back on. We need to do that so that we are mobile well into old age and we need to do that because we are incredibly prone to osteoporosis after menopause, our bones, which are honeycomb structure that the holes in that honeycomb will get bigger. But if we strength train, we build a muscle up around those bones to protect it. And also the act of strength, the sort of pressure that strength training puts on your bones actually makes those holes smaller again. So it's just a thing we must do. However, and I get this because I have felt this, strength training, that is lifting weight.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh absolutely, and there are I mean there are things that it is very difficult, I think, for women to fully get their heads around and accept. And one of the things that I have got really involved with over the last year, and one of the things that became really obvious well over.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, no, absolutely. I mean, there were some of the things that I found out were sort of boringly obvious and simple. So one of the things that, like these 25 amazing people with incredible knowledge, but they were all a bit like, yeah, you see, what you've got to do is sleep well, exercise, eat well, and manage your stress. And I know it's really boring, but, you know, that's really, really important. But another thing that came up over and over again is this idea of knowing your body and listening to your body, which sounds so trite and so cliched, but is just incredibly powerful and true. And I think the more... In observant we are of what our bodies really want for us. The better chance we have of doing right by it.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My physio expert was very, very keen to point out. Indeed, I'm very, very keen to point out none of that means that women shouldn't exercise quite the opposite. We should. We should. Women's football, it's happening with women's football is incredible. And it is changing the world. But all women should exercise because it's just really fun and really good for us. But there are ways to exercise that are better for us at certain times of a menstrual cycle and going into perimenopause and menopause. There are just different things that we can do that will make us function better and will move better and will make us far less likely to be injured.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“so during the course of the average month, we tend to think of the medical cycle as the period and directly before our periods when we're in what feels like a bit of hormonal crisis. In fact, throughout the whole of the month, hormonal load is fluctuating wildly, which makes us feel very different things at very different times. For the last third of the menstrual cycle, progress their own, sex woman, progesterone is kind of in charge of your body. And that raises your body's core temperature, which means you sleep less well, which means that you're a bit less coordinated in the day, which means if you're doing something like playing football at an extremely high level, and you're just a little bit more tired than you were a week earlier. You're all these things. So all these tiny, tiny little facts that come together to make you more likely to hurt yourself”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally quite late in the game. I spoke to a former professional footballer, female footballer, about this, and she was like, you have no idea. This is driving her mad 20 years ago, but it's taken them to now to go, oh yeah, take different foot shape. And I've got an awful feeling we are so used to our shoes hurting that they just got on with it. You know, maybe just don't know any different. You think it hurts. You don't raise that question. So that was a problem. There are problems around obviously on a grassroots level that young girls aren't being trained and looked up, their bodies aren't being looked after in the same way that young boys' bodies are. I think there was the sort of escalation in the women's game meant that suddenly women were, far, far more was being asked of women than had been to that point. And again, they weren't training the same way. The menstrual cycle, incredibly important.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quadriceps angle? Can't quite remember, but it is the angle between the hip and the knee, which in women is greater, which means that when we turn quickly, when we cut, as it's called in ball, which is turning very quickly and moving your weight around very quickly, that puts more pressure on your knee, on the ligament in your knee than it would do if you were straight up and down. So it's a purely anatomical issue and that they think is one of the reasons that women are having that particular injury. Another reason that women are having that particular injury is the small men thesis for a long, long time and it was a man who works quite high up in professional football here, who told me this. For a long time, the assumption was that women speak were just smaller versions of men's feet. So they just scaled down male football boots. For women, turns out we have completely different shake feet. I mean, when did they start thinking?”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said to me, You need to tell me where you are in your menstrual cycle so I couldn't really know what's going on in your body. And I was like, no, you're a man. But then it turned out he was right because that stuff is important. He ended up Tom Bradley, I think I said, he ended up because of his involvement because of his work with another client, Nike have a mental training app function on there in their tech because of him. But so one of the reasons that women injure themselves, the ACL injury seems to be a lot to do with the Q angle, oh, which I think is...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that there's a load of things going on there. And again, they're really, really interesting in some cases really frustrating and irritating. But again, they are being talked about. They are being discussed. They are being considered. And there are ways forward. So one of the things when I did quite a lot of the research, it was in the summer of 2023. So I think it was the Euros that were going on or maybe at the World Cup. It was some big female football tournament. But half the players pretty much were out with what's called an ACL injury and anterior cruciate ligament injury. And that's a ligament in the knee. And when it goes, it is apparently incredibly painful. And it can take you out of your sport for a long, long time. And it's really common in women. The physiotherapist I talk to who is a man, but we will let him get away with that because he's brilliant. And he was actually the first person who ever said to me, he's my physiotherapist. And he's the first person who ever...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm more than cautiously optimistic. The whole experience left me feeling really hopeful. I mean, that is an easy thing to say. I am not a woman who has suffered, luckily, any particular pain apart from migraines. So, you know, I think I probably got a quite lightly health-wise to this point. No, there was real solid work and there was real passion out there for it.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and to have had, if they'd all been working for at least twenty years, some of them thirty, forty years, so they had seen breakthroughs, they had seen changes, and they could see more. I think they're all very excited about AI because I think that's different experience for journalists, but I think for scientists that does bring real potential for things speeding up. I remember the GP that one of the GPs that I spoke to, Dr. Philippa Kay, saying, look, you know, this has been 2,000 years in the making, right? Like for 2,000 years, women were completely ignored. So it's only really been the last 100, 120 years that we featured at”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean I have to say that and I know there are so many problems around medical misogyny and that women's bodies and women's pain and women's illness and women's experience has been just so undermined and ignored. However, talking to all these people made me feel like it definitely is getting a bit better and be there. I mean my God, they care. They cared so much. These are people who have dedicated. I worked it out, but it's, you know, hundreds of years between them to women's bodies and to alleviating our pain and making our experience better. And they really care. Yeah, they were all desperate for more money for funding and research, of course they were, and quite rightly. But they were all also hopeful and optimistic and they all had, you know, all had cause to be hopeful and to believe that things were getting better.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know that we've done it, we were all there, and it's made me look at teenagers in the street and just go, oh, bless you, because that's so hard. And then as a neuroscientist said, you know, we don't look at todlets who are going through equivalent restructuring with our brain and kind of acquiring all these new skills. We don't look at toddlers and go, oh my God, you're so stupid. Look at you. You can't even walk. You won't be able to walk properly to your four. That's ridiculous. But we do that's teenagers. We mop them and we sneer them and we see those things as cause for derision. When in fact they're biologically compelled and it's painful. So, I mean, yeah, I could go on all of it, all of it blew my mind.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And about anything that happens so kind of cringing about anything, if somebody laughs near them, they'll assume it's about them. And I just find that, I mean, again, it's sort of heartbreakingly lovely.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much everything the neuroscientist, Dr. Sarah McKay, told me was just extraordinary because I think there was something else again about understanding what's happening in our brains. So she told me, for example, I spoke to her about puberty. So I talked to her about women's brains in puberty, in pregnancy in charba, and in menopause, because those are three areas of expertise. And teenagers' brains change. They restructure, say, if the grey matter gets thinner, which sounds like a bad thing, but it's in fact a very good thing because it means they're getting sharper and quicker. It means the connections in their brains are getting quicker. They're getting cleverer, effectively. change both drives them to seek out other social situations. So it's the thing, it's that compulsion to be with your friends, not your family. It's sort of an overwhelming urge, but it also makes them unbelievably sensitive to anything that happens within that situation. So they're pushed towards new social situations while also being incredibly sensitive.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of sadness over the amount of pain that women endure, and of course again you've only got your personal experience really on that kind of stuff to draw from. It's very difficult to get a metric on who's feeling the kinds of pain they're feeling and that women themselves and that this is a lot of the problem with women's bodies and the treating with women's bodies adequately. Women themselves don't really know what is tolerable, right? What is a reasonable amount of pain to experience with your period? I spoke to one woman and she's in the book who's like, do you know when the first time I passed off from my period was? I was 17. I'm like, that's not okay. So I think the amount of things that women put up with, that also blew my mind. And then...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, people have asked me this, and I'd say every paragraph in that book has something that blew my tiny mind when I first found it out and kind of overarching, I was like, how did I not know this before? Really, how did I not know this before? So that's probably the big no, but it was sort of honestly everything from you're supposed to wash your knickers at 70 degrees and that you shouldn't wear them in bed, which is one of the ones that people are taking one of the bits of emergency that people are taking away, like just huge. And there were some women who were like, oh, I did know that already, actually, I'm very pleased with themselves. But most women are like, you're what? So everything from that to...”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“but then also to kind of draw on this sort of collective experience of older women around me and my own, because that makes it less boring, right? I also didn't want, it's not a textbook, that there are medical books out there already. There are plenty of medical textbooks. I didn't want that. I wanted it to be something that was enjoyable to read and that felt warm and engaged and super, super human. And that is just the sort of writer I am anyway. That's how I write any feature, you know, if I'm writing about if I'm interviewing a celebrity, I will ask my barista when I get my coffee that morning what they think of them. Just a really good sounding board, right? Other people's ideas are brilliant. So, yes, I stole them.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“O God, absolutely. I mean, I wanted it to feel really organic, so I wanted it to feel, and it was, you know, it was me kind of going, you know, literally having a conversation with a good mate who also happens to be a GP and then her saying, oh, why don't you talk to so-and-so? And then that person's saying, oh, why don't you talk to Dame Leslie Regan? And Professor Andrew Horne, one of the main academics who's looking into endometriosis. And so.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the last 10 years of my life anywhere, I've been on a bit of a boring classic midlife, Odyssey, to just be as well as I possibly can be, you know, me and everybody else. But I definitely think it is impossible not to know these things, not to know if I do that, I will feel better. It's really hard to then not do that. So when you're sort of learning all these things, taking in all this information, some of it sticks. And some of it leads to you treating your body more kindly.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is this a bit like therapy? Like, you have to understand your past to understand yourself more fully now. And that definitely happened that you kind of go, oh, that's why I did that when I was 23. I was off my face on estrogen. Like I had no option. So I think it makes you much more sort of understanding of past incarnations of yourself because understanding yourself from a medical health perspective is to completely understand yourself. It is like therapy. I think it makes you much more sort of compassionate in terms of things you've done and things you've experienced. Pain you've experienced physically and emotionally. And I think it hopefully it makes you like and love your body much more. I've definitely”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, slightly hugely different. I mean, I think, and again, to go back to the politics that I was so keen not to dip into, women are considered to think almost uniquely about what their bodies look like, right? That's what we spend our whole time thinking about, but how the female body looks. And the idea of jumping from that to really understanding how it works is a big old leap. But it's an extraordinary one. It's so liberating. I felt the process of writing it. And again, when I talk to readers, what they tend to do is they pick it up, they read the introduction, they go straight to the bit that's most about them, like a friend who has endometriosis went straight to the endometriosis church. Of course you do. We're all raging narcissists, right? Anyone in perimenopause, strict to perimenopause. But then they also most gratifyingly said that then they ended up going back to puberty because you sort of have to start from the beginning. And what it gave me and what it seems to be giving other people, which is love.”
2025-08-12 · Intelligence Squared · How Well do we Understand the Female Body? With Polly Vernon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT