I’m no expert on pirate culture, but even my cursory education is enough to show me that women are more sidekicks than stars on the dangerous high seas. That’s why it was so fun to record our latest episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You about female pirates. We focused in on the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, which was a pretty easy choice to make, given that they seem to be the only two female pirates that researchers really know about or have studied. Either the other female pirates were really good at maintaining their secret identities, or they sailed on really boring ships.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read, on the other hand, were all about living life to the dangerous max. They dressed as men in order to get aboard ships, but documents from the time indicate that their fellow pirates and some of their prisoners were aware they were women. They fought duels and plundered ships. They engaged in dramatic love affairs. They were the only two that fought off those that would bring their crew to justice, and then they escaped death by revealing pregnancies.

Juicy stuff! So juicy that, as I said, it’s hard to find many resources about other female pirates. We touched briefly on the case of Cheng I Sao, though, and we also talked about how the Somali pirate situation affects women. Our sources:

• “When Women Pirates Sailed the Seas” by Marcus Rediker, Wilson Quarterly (available via library database)
• “Pirates in the Atlantic World,” Smithsonian National Museum of American History
• “Women Pirates: Circulations of Power and Anxiety in the Early 18th Century Atlantic” by Johanna Pastel, Earlham College
• “Most Successful Pirate was Beautiful and Tough” by Maggie Koerth, CNN
• “Burcad badeed — The Implications of Piracy for Somali Women” by Shukria Dini, Society for International Development Forum
• “Seafaring Women” by David Cordingly
• “Cross-dressing on the Margins of Empire: Women Pirates and the Narrative of the Caribbean” by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Know of any other female pirates we should investigate? Got any pirate jokes? Leave us a comment, or join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Councilman Catania will find something to like — as well as a cause for concern — in a study coming out today (hat tip to Feministing). The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Texas and New York University, examined the habits of women who do have access to birth control without a prescription. That magical place where you don’t have to wait months to see a doctor? Mexico. The researchers followed 1,000 low-income women in El Paso, Texas who used oral contraceptives. Half of the women got their birth control pills over the counter in Mexico, while the other half went through the doctor appointment and prescription rigmarole in El Paso.

The women who had to see a doctor and refill a prescription were 60 percent more likely to stop taking their pills over the course of nine months compared to the women who drove across the border. And women who received fewer than six packs of pills at a time were even more likely to give up on birth control and take their chances. According to the researchers, this suggests that making birth control easily accessible is a key factor in correct and continued usage.

And the bad news of this study? While the women who got their pills in Mexico took their pills more regularly, they may not have taken the right ones. Contraceptives containing both estrogen and progesterone are not the best option for women who have conditions such as hypertension or women who smoke because of the possibility of medical complications. According to the study, 13 percent of the over-the-counter subjects were taking pills that they possibly shouldn’t (though none of the women had major medical complications), compared to nine percent of the women who saw a doctor first.

So, we end where we began — with question marks hanging over the issue. On the one hand, improving access to birth control could prevent much of the misery of an unplanned pregnancy, but on the other, we shouldn’t trade the expertise of a doctor for quick convenience.

Want more Stuff Mom Never Told You? Join Molly and Cristen on Facebook and Twitter!

For centuries, doctors were troubled by the problem of female hysteria. Patients presented with symptoms like irritability, headaches, insomnia, depression, stomachaches and weepiness. The earliest doctors attributed these symptoms to the uterus, and they advised married women to have sex to get their reproductive organs to settle down! Single and widowed women were told to enjoy vigorous horseback rides and long, rickety train excursions.

Eventually, doctors began performing massages of the external genitalia for these female hysterics. The end result? The women would experience paroxysm, which allowed them to relax and sleep at night. Get your mind out of the gutter — evidence suggests that doctors saw found this as arousing as a root canal. In fact, the doctors would get so tired of performing this service that they leapt at the chance to acquire mechanical vibrating devices that could do the job for them. A good vibrator became essential to most medical practices, and also to most homes — catalogues from the turn of the 20th century show that these appliances were marketed extensively to women. And again, none of the advertisements were sexy or suggestive; owning a vibrator was like owning a bottle of Tylenol.

This history of vibrators has captivated playwrights and screenwriters of late. Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)” has been captivating theater audiences, and later this year, we’ll be treated to “Hysteria,” a romantic comedy starring Maggie Gyllenhaal. If you want to get ahead of the rest of the audience, check out our sources for this episode below:

• “Half of Americans Use Vibrators, Study Claims,” LiveScience
• “In the History of Gynecology, a Surprising Chapter” by Natalie Angier, New York Times
• “Batteries Not Included” by Sarah Boxer, New York Times
• “Did Victorian era doctors use vibrators to treat hysteric female patients with orgasm therapy?” by Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope
• “Your Grandmother’s Vibrator” by Teresa Riordan, Slate
• “A Quaint Treatment for Women Wronged” by Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Thoughts? Comments? Leave them here, or drop us a line on the Stuff Mom Never Told You Twitter and Facebook.

Our sources for this episode:

• “Put your sweet lips…” by Keith Thomas, the Sunday Times
• “Saliva: Secret Ingredient in the Best Kisses” by Robin Lloyd, LiveScience
• “The Science of the Smooch” by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon
• “The Kiss of Life” by Joshua Foer, New York Times
• “The Kiss: A 50th Anniversary Lecture” by Leonore Tiefer, The Kinsey Institute
• “Kisstory tells the history of kissing,” Hindustan Times
• “Things You Didn’t Know About Kissing” by Sheril Kirshenbaum, Discover (available via library database)
• “Kissing right way begins in the womb” by Andy Coghlan, New Scientist
• “62 Years Later, a Kiss That Can’t Be Forgotten” by Sewell Chan, New York Times
• “The 10 Most Important Kisses in the Universe” by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Mental Floss

Feeling your temperature rise with all this kissing talk? Well, if you’re a woman, that warmth might be a welcome change. On Wednesday, we talked about why it is that women always seem to feel colder than men do. As someone who’s shivered my way through a work day while male coworkers walk around in t-shirts, I was especially interested to hear what science would have to say about this phenomenon. There are many factors involved, including weight, diet, age and stress level, but I thought it was pretty cool that women’s bodies may work especially hard to keep the core body warm at the expense of our limbs. The saying “cold hands, warm heart” turns out to be true, and we have to agree it has a nicer ring to it than “cold hands, warm kidneys.”

Want to learn more? Have a look at our source material:

• “Warm Heart, Cold Hands” by Amanda Schaffer, Slate
• “Why do women always feel colder than men?” by Kate Wighton, The Times
• “Why are women always cold?” by Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope
• “An (alleged) extra layer of female fat” by April Holladay, USA Today
• “Why You’re Always Cold (or Hot) at Work” by Laura Morsch, CareerBuilder
• “When the Office Gives You Chills” by Phyllis Korkki, New York Times
• “One Shivers, the Other Doesn’t” by Kate Stone Lombardi, New York Times
• Raynaud’s Association Web site
• “When Cold Fingers Mean Raynaud’s, or Worse” by Winnie Yu, New York Times
• “Getting to the Root of Raynaud’s” by Winnie Yu, New York Times

Want to talk about kissing and how cold it is in your office? Then why don’t you head over to the Stuff Mom Never Told You Facebook and Twitter pages and start a conversation? And if you’re on the go, I highly recommend the HowStuffWorks.com iPhone app.

It can be hard to extract yourself from an abusive relationship and begin to live again without fear. That difficulty is compounded if you bear the scars of your past. That’s why the work of people like Dr. Andrew Jacono is so important. Dr. Jacono provides free plastic surgery to women who have endured physical abuse, and his work is profiled on a new show called “Facing Trauma.” This show airs on Sunday at 10 p.m. on the new Discovery Fit & Health channel (check local listings here).

I think you’ll like this show if you have any interest in medicine — Dr. Jacono uses some pretty groundbreaking techniques to fix physical defects, and the before-and-after pictures are stunning — but I also think “Facing Trauma” will be an important show for those of us concerned about issues like domestic violence. All too often,  people may consider their job is done when a person leaves an abusive relationship, but this show demonstrates the fact that abuse survivors have a long road ahead of them. In this interview, Dr. Jacono talks about how the surgery can cause emotional trauma in his patients and how important emotional support is for survivors, no matter how many years they’ve been free from their attacker. It’s a lesson we could all stand to learn, even when the scars aren’t on a person’s face.

You can find out more about domestic violence and get some sneak peeks at Sunday’s episode of “Facing Trauma” at Discovery Health. And you can get more from the gals of Stuff Mom Never Told You on Facebook and Twitter.

If you’d like to read more about the science of hot flashes, here are the sources we consulted:

• “Hot Flashes,” Mayo Clinic
• “What causes hot flashes?” by Brette Sember, Discovery Health
• “Average duration of hot flashes may be longer than previously thought,” Harvard Women’s Health Watch (available via library database)
• “How to Treat Menopause with Aromatherapy” by Kathi Keville, Discovery Health
• “Seeking Natural Remedies for Hot Flashes” by Camille Sweeney, New York Times
• “Probing the Mind’s Role in Hot Flashes” by Marie McCullough, Philadelphia Inquirer
• “Hot Flashes or Depression: Which Comes First?” Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women’s Health
• “Sleep and Menopause,” WebMD
• “New Villains in a Menopausal Mystery” by Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times
• “Too Young for Hot Flashes?” NIH News in Health
• “Men’s Hot Flashes: Andropause?” Go Ask Alice

I’m not too proud to admit that I read my horoscope, and that I tend to find ways in which it came true while ignoring the parts that weren’t applicable. And based on our research for an episode about astrological compatibility, I know that I’m not alone in that. Women are more likely to read their horoscopes and extract the positive, relevant things, and there’s really no harm in that as long as we don’t use our horoscopes as our only source of motivation. But one study, by Susan Blackmore and Marianne Seebold, indicates that even those of us who believe there’s something to astrology don’t take it too seriously in our real-life relationships; in the study, women who received excellent horoscopes about their relationships were no more likely to report that the relationship was stronger than they were before they read the horoscope.

The best news to come out of this episode was that Cristen and I are extremely compatible, astrologically-speaking. Our sources:

• “Paranormal Believes Come (Super)Naturally to Some” by Linda Lyons, Gallup
• “A statistical test of astrology” by Jayant V. Narlikar, Sudhakar Kunte, Narendra Dabholkar and Prakash Ghatpande, Current Science
• “Scientists dump cold water on astrology” by Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News via ABC.net
• “Are Horoscopes Healthy?” by Sherry Rauh, WebMD
• “Who believes in astrology? Effect of favorableness of astrologically derived personality descriptions on acceptance of astrology” by Margaret Hamilton, Personality and Individual Differences
• “The effect of horoscopes on women’s relationships” by Susan Blackmore and Marianne Seebold, Correlation
• “What is Synastry?” Sasstrology
• CafeAstrology.com Web site
• “Toward a Social Astrology: Recognising the Social Character of Life” by Andre Donnell

And now we’d like to hear from you. Do you have any tips on dealing with a hot flash? Do you read your horoscope? Are you a Sagittarius or a Leo? If so, you and I are very compatible! No matter your sign, please leave us a comment, drop us a line or find us over on Twitter and Facebook. And if you can’t get enough HowStuffWorks, put our new app on your iPhone.

But one quote provided on the Web site really stood out to me. When asked about the frequent dating and adoption rumors, Aniston says, “I think people honestly just want to see me as a mom and married and barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen…And I just want to say, ‘Everybody, relax! It’s going to happen!’”

Reading that line, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recent Stuff Mom Never Told You podcast about people who elect to remain childfree. In the episode, Cristen and I talked about how difficult it can be for women who don’t feel a maternal urge to admit that, as our society places a high premium on marriage and motherhood. These stages are so ingrained that people feel comfortable asking perfect strangers when they’ll marry and have children; if the response is “never,” those same strangers often advise a woman that she’ll change her mind.

Since doing the episode, we’ve heard from many women — single and married — that don’t want kids. The constant questioning about the matter doesn’t cease, though, which I suppose is something regular women have in common with Jennifer Aniston. And here’s the thing about the questioning, whether it’s to Jennifer Aniston or your second cousin: It’s pretty rude. The activities of one’s uterus really shouldn’t be up for public discussion. If someone doesn’t have children, telling her she’ll change their mind can be condescending, or even heart-breaking, as you might be questioning someone with fertility issues that make her unable to conceive.

Now, I’m not saying Jennifer Aniston wants to remain childfree — none of us know, and none of us should know. Many people are just rooting for this symbol of a scorned woman to find true happiness and love. But let’s stop assuming that a baby is part of that picture.

You can get more Stuff Mom Never Told You by following Molly and Cristen on Twitter and Facebook, as well as by downloading the HowStuffWorks iPhone app.

On this week’s Stuff Mom Never Told You, Cristen and I investigated gender differences in dreams, and we found that men tend to dream about sex and violence, while women dream about school, bathrooms, wardrobe malfunctions and teeth. Women also tend to have more nightmares than men (or at least, remember them more often), and ladies are starting to catch up to guys in terms of number of reported sex dreams. Dreaming just hasn’t been the same for me since we did this episode!

Our sources for the dream podcast:

• “What Dreams Are Made Of” by Barbara Kantrowitz, Newsweek
• “The Sleep Diaries: Do Men and Women Dream Differently?” by Annie Tucker Morgan, Divine Caroline
• “Typical Dreams: Stability and Gender Differences” by Michael Schredl, Petra Ciric, Simon Gotz and Lutz Wittmann, The Journal of Psychology (available via library database)
• “Women Have Nightmares, Men Dream of Sex,” LiveScience
• “Why Women Have Worse Nightmares Than Men” by Dan Childs, ABC
• “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” by Alfred Kinsey
• “Sleeping Booty” by William Saletan, Slate
• “Sex on the (Dreaming) Brain” by Coturnix, Science Blogs
• “Women dream about sex as much as men,” Agence France-Presse via Cosmos
• “Lids Together, Dreams Apart,” Psychology Today (available via library database)

Up next: corsets! The corset is quite the controversial piece of clothing, and I must admit that I’d always thought that corsets were a terrible thing meant to keep women from breathing. However, in researching this podcast, I learned that idea was quite mistaken. For example, the practice of tight-lacing (which is exactly what it sounds like) was extremely rare in real-life (though common in certain men’s imaginations). Women were never put into iron corsets, either — those designs were used for wounded soldiers undergoing rehabilitation. And though medical writings of the time urged women to untie their corsets, these tomes were usually put forward by doctors concerned about low birth rates who mistakenly though the corset could reshape the reproductive organs.

The sources we used to cull such fun facts:

• “The Corset: A Cultural History” by Valerie Steele
• “The Secret History of the Corset and Crinoline,” The Victoria and Albert Museum
• “Well-Rounded” by Eleri Lynn, Slate
• “Of Corset Matters” by Christina Larson, Washington Monthly
• “Death and the Maiden” by Jonathon Keats, Salon

What did you think of these episodes, dear listeners? What’s haunting your dreams these days? Have you taken to wearing corsets? Let us know. You can find us over on Facebook and on Twitter, and we’ve also got a spot on the new HowStuffWorks iPhone app.

The New York Times has some statistics that might surprise you: Among women aged 18 to 49, “Sunday Night Football” is the third most-watched program in the United States (following “Dancing with the Stars” and “Grey’s Anatomy”). And when it comes to games on all channels, 34 percent of the NFL’s viewers are women.

Now, maybe you think these ladies just watch because there’s nothing else on, or because their boyfriends are watching. I’m going to have to call a foul on that, as one study, published in “Clinical Cardiology” reveals that women get just as wrapped up in the game as men. See, when your team loses, you get upset and stressed, which can lead to a heart attack. According to the study, men rooting for the losing team demonstrated a 15 percent increase in cardiac deaths compared to the baseline, but the real surprise was the increased rate of cardiac death in women — a whopping 27 percent rise. In other words, women have just as much at stake with a beloved team as men.

One researcher hedged his bets and said the only reason that women experienced such an increase in cardiac death was because they were upset for their guys. As one final effort to disabuse that notion, I’d like to point you toward another study published on Huffington Post yesterday. According to Zoosk, 73 percent of single women would rather watch the Super Bowl than have sex. The men, on the other hand, were evenly split on whether they’d watch the game or have sex. Now, perhaps these results say more about the men these single ladies are meeting than their love of the game, but I’m going to hope for everyone’s sake that that’s not the case. See you Sunday.

Not watching the game? Then you’ll have plenty of free time to post on our Facebook page and to follow us on Twitter! And if you download the new HowStuffWorks iPhone app, you can pretend you’re checking the score, all the while enjoying our site!

If there’s sun on February 2, that is.  The celebrity in question is Punxsutawney Phil, the famed groundhog who emerges every year to let us know our chances of an early spring. This year, for the first time, Punxsutawney Phyllis will also be making an appearance. Visitors to Pennsylvania will also be able to buy a plush Phyllis to accompany their souvenir Phil.

Living in the shadow (pun intended) of a famous groundhog can’t be easy, but Barb Consiglio of WTAJ reports that Phyllis has an additional cross to bear. See, according to legend, Phil the groundhog gets to drink from the elixir of life, which is how he’s been able to fulfill his weather-related duties for 125 years. Phyllis, however, hasn’t had the same elixir and remains a mortal groundhog. That means the Phyllis we see on Wednesday is just one in a long line of Phil’s wives. But maybe that’s OK. If you lived with a guy that scared of his shadow, wouldn’t you be ready to leave this mortal coil, too?