Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell Reinvent Sex: The Penis Goes Into the Vagina

Everything I’ve learned about progressive parenting as a single childless person has been courtesy of Dax Shepard discussing his wife Kristen Bell on his alarmingly successful podcast Armchair Expert. I won’t begrudge either of them their achievements, but I just wish I had different celebrity role models for my imagined future. As a child, watching Dax on Punk’d, or even as an older child, watching Dax on Parenthood, I never would have guessed that he’d one day become a prominent dadfluencer. I always thought The Good Place was fairly cloying in terms of its storytime-level morality, so maybe I saw this coming from Kristen. Either way, now there’s no going back.

People reports that on a recent episode of the pod, Dax explained the “ingenious” sex advice his wife offered to their daughters Delta (6) and Lincoln (8) to reclaim female agency in the cisgender boudoir. "Right away it's like, you're in charge of this and you will decide to put this in your vagina," he said. "Not the man puts his penis in your vagina."

"He's got this ridiculous protrusion, so it would seem he was in the driver's seat, but you're going to take that and put that in, you know,” Dax quotes his wife. “And I was like, 'Oh, that's a nice little adjustment we're going to make.' "

I guess this is fine enough advice if you believe that potential power imbalances in heterosexual sex come down to the ladies experimenting with active/passive verb construction in their internal monologues. But I do worry, admittedly not as an all-knowing father of daughters like Dax, about how realistic this allegedly perspective-shifting advice is.

I wish Delta and Lincoln fulfilling, consensual, empowering futures! As for the rest of us, we better buckle the fuck up in the largest period-proof underwear we have, because we’re in for another news cycle in which celebrities give us parenting advice and then people online accuse them of collaborating with the deep state.