Liberation, Eroticism, and Sex in Public (with Angela Jones)

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0:57as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments and they get early access to interview series episodes as well, like this one. Gain access to that content at 4formedia.co. This week, we are joined by Dr. Angela Jones. Hi, Angela. Hey, it's so good to see you. Thanks for having me. So good to see you. Thank you for being here. Of course. Angela is a professor of, I'm going to try to read your whole CV right now. That'll be the episode. Angela is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University.

1:33In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals, including porn studies and Black Scholar. They're the author, co-author and or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter reference handbook and camming money, power and pleasure in the sex industry. Here it is. Which came my torn up copy, which came out in 2020. And honestly, this book advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding about the online adult industry. And it came out in 2020, which was you could not have planned a better publication date for this. And everybody and their mom was camming all of a sudden.

2:09Their latest book, Sex in Public, which is here. This is the proof copy. But then I have the very nicely textured. This is ASMR time. Sex in Public, the transformative social power of our erotic lives just launched last week. when recording this. Very exciting. How's it going? How are you feeling post-launch? I am feeling really excited. You know, I come from the world of academia. And so finally publishing something for a trade audience just feels really good. And the reception has been really good so far. This is the most vulnerable thing I've ever written. And so I think the fact that it's already being well-received is just really affirming and really exciting.

2:51Yeah. You spend a couple of years just like writing something kind of in isolation and then you hope that people like it. And then when you get to publish it, it's like, oh my God. Oh my God. And then at a certain point it's like, okay, take this away. Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. A thousand percent. Don't ever let me look at this again. That's the vibe. That was the vibe after I published mine. And yours is so good. Not just in substance, of course, but even like we were talking, you were talking about the cover, like aesthetically, like I love the way yours came together and the images. And I feel like a lot of time publishers are resistant to kind of images, especially color ones.

3:22So yours is just really stunning in a lot of ways to me too. Thank you. Yeah. The images were crazy. I don't think I'd ever do another book with images, but I hear you. Just the permissions alone for like the six that are in here was like, you know, a lot. Yeah. So I would love to, for folks who are unfamiliar, to get a little bit of your own backstory? Because as you mentioned, this is a pretty vulnerable personal book, which is very different from academia. How did you get to this place in your life where you're writing this book? Like, how did you come to be interested in sex work from an academic standpoint?

3:59I know you also have a background as a sex worker. So if you want to walk us through just like how you got here, I think that would be a great place to start. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think for some time now to just to kind of give folks a sense of who I am as an academic, right? So my research is really important to me, but so is my teaching. And I think when it comes to my research, which has always been really important to me, is that it has some impact, some applied focus, right? That the communities that I'm working with, they're not just some objective group, you know, like some group of people out there that I want to extract from.

4:37Like these are communities whose lives I care about and feel committed to. And so doing work that I think can help the communities that I write about that can, listen, I don't want to overstate my kind of impact in the world, right? But like, so for example, you know, in some of the work that I've done around sex work, you know, some of the most, I think, meaningful work for me, for example, has been when a few of us were writing scientific memos to support decrim bills, like on the ground, like that sort of work has been really important to me. And so it just fast forward, it just kind of felt like time to stop writing books for academic audiences that, you know, like if you're lucky, 500 people read, right?

5:22I mean, that's a good book. And to start writing for mainstream audiences, right? Like I think that there's so much work that myself and my disciplinary colleagues are doing that need to be written for people, you know, in the world. And so that was some of the broader motivation here, what brought me here. But I think in terms of writing about sex and sexuality for our mainstream audience, some of this motivation is certainly intellectual, but always driven by those political commitments, right? Like, I want better sexual literacy for everybody. And I think that there's a lot of really amazing cutting-edge research that doesn't always make it to kind of mainstream public discourse.

6:03And I want that work out there, and I want to be a part of that. And I think part of the problem is a lot of the research that does make it to kind of mainstream discourses often emphasizes what I write about in the book is these kind of three Ds, right? So it's dysfunction and disease, ease and I want more pleasure and more empowerment. But I think some of this was really personally motivated for me. As I kind of introduce in the book, I feel like I wish I had a better sex education, right? Like I wish that I was more sexually literate when, especially when I was younger. And I think about all the ways that, you know, a lot of the harm that I've experienced might not have been had I have had better sex education.

6:51And so I think if this book can help people know themselves a little bit better, understand sexuality in more holistic ways, right? Ways that again, helps them better understand themselves, their partners, that allows them to connect all of the facets of their sexuality to the world around them. That makes me so, so happy. Yeah. Yeah. I feel that deeply as someone who grew up in a very rural place in a pretty conservative environment, Christian environment. There was no, the sex education I had was like, you're going to hell. If you dress and tempt the boys, you're doomed, which was just such a harmful narrative.

7:34And I think it's a lot of people's inner narrative when they're children and then they take that into adulthood. Absolutely. That leads me into just going back to way before either of our childhoods. You start this book talking about sexology and the advent of sexology as a study and the ways that that history influences our current day are so interesting. You write, and I will try not to quote your book at you too much, but you wrote, you can't build wealth and maintain patriarchal monogamous marriage between cisgender white women and white men if people do not stop getting it on across racial, gender, and class lines.

8:14Sexology, like all sciences, was shaped by the political and cultural context in which these ideas emerged. I feel like that is one of a few theses of this book. And I would love for you to briefly unpack or lengthily unpack that for us a bit. I guess, what is sexology for the people who aren't familiar? And how did that view influence how we see like deviant sex and things like that? Absolutely. This is a great question. And this is one of those moments of the book that I feel like is a little bit nerdier, but I hope that people find a lot of value in learning about these histories because there were even new things that I learned in the course of researching this part of the book.

8:53So for those who are not familiar, broadly speaking, sexology is the systematic study of human sexuality. And it's got a relatively short epistemological history, which is to say that now there is a lot of research being done on sexuality. But initially, a lot of that research was coming from both kind of medical doctors and psychologists who were primarily interested in kind of categorizing sexuality. And in the process, they're basically discursively creating these hierarchical systems, right? So they're not just studying human sexuality to descriptively document all of the wonderful, pleasurable things that people are doing with their lives, they're doing it with judgment, right?

9:37They're doing it to cast some, especially erotic practices and behaviors as inherent, right? And setting up structures of these practices are normal, and these practices are abnormal. And what I think is really important, and I love the section that you read from, and there's another line somewhere close to what you read that I think is really important for people, which is something to the effect of don't ever let the pretense of scientific objectivity fool you, right? A lot of times people are like, well, you know, the doctor said so, and the scientist said so, right? Like those ideas that come out of science, they are also socially constructed.

10:16They are shaped by whatever the political milieu is at the time. And so for example, if we look at some of the early writing, when scientists first start labeling kind of this is we're going to call this heterosexuality. We're going to call this homosexuality. Right. And especially in the context of the United States, some of this history comes out of Vienna and Germany. But looking at the United States, what was interesting for me is the development of a lot of this science right around the same time, the sexology, right around the same time as the introduction of Jim Crow segregation. Right.

10:51And so understanding that at the time, you know, when you think about Jim Crow segregation, a part of that history that often gets lost is that a lot of the history of Jim Crow policy was about sex. And if I can be crass for a moment, it was about fucking. And it was about keeping people, it was about preventing so-called miscegenation, right? And so there's this interesting, maybe, dare I say, sinister relationship between what's happening in sexology and what's happening in political discourse, right? So politically, you want to keep people, right, from having sex across class groups, across genders, right?

11:31Well, you want to prevent them from, you know, same gender anyway. And so there's just this interesting relationship between sexology and upholding existing systems and structures of power. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's not about just like what you or I do in bed. It's what we as a society say is okay or not okay to do in bed and how we've gotten to that point. The title is fantastic. The title is Sex in Public. Do you want to kind of walk us through sex in public as a concept? You know, even like the social power of our erotic lives. I think just that phrase itself is a little bit mind blowing just because sex is a very private thing that you do in your own home, usually, you know, it's like, you don't talk about it.

12:16That's how we see it as a society. But talking about it with social power, I think is really important to unpack. Yeah, thanks for that. So, so initially, like the first draft of this book was called The Social Life of Sexuality, which is now the title of chapter one with all the sciencey stuff we were just talking a little bit about. And what's interesting, if you'll indulge me for a second the title when we were initially workshopping titles with the kind of team at the publisher there was somebody on the team who was like i don't like sex in public and we were like why and they were like because people are going to think that this book is just about like take it very very literally right that this book is about people actually like having sex in public right like exhibition right exactly like this is just about like i don't know the people in sex clubs or the people, you know, fornicating in parks or something or in tea rooms or whatever.

13:09And to be clear, you will meet some of those people and see some of that in the book. But I think one of the reasons why we ended up landing there, despite some skepticism on the team, was that I think in some ways it's like a double entendre, which is, I think it carries a lot of meaning, the title. So when we say sex in public, we want fundamentally i want people to understand sex not as you were saying as like this private thing this physiological thing that you're kind of born with that's innate that you kind of have no control over right um to understanding it as something that is public and we say public not necessarily because you're doing the sexual things in public but because the world around us shapes every facet of our sexuality, right?

13:57So one of the arguments in the book is, again, wanting people to understand sexuality more holistically, right? So thinking about sexuality as having many different components, our desires, right? Our erotic practices, behaviors, our identities, our relationships, right? In terms of what relationship structures, forms we like, the communities that we're a part of. Anyway, but thinking about how, so for example, for people who experience desire and attraction, asking people, right, so you're listening right now, pause for a moment and think, how has the world around you, the public, all of its institutions, the media, family, government, right, like all of these structures around us, how have they shaped how you understand your desires?

14:43Again, if you experience desire, if you experience attraction, how is the world around you shaped that? And then I think another part of the kind of sex in public that I think is really important to the through lines that you're alluding to is one of the things I'm looking at is thinking about erotic dialectics and thinking about historical change. And I want everybody to appreciate just how much human eroticism, not necessarily sex, human eroticism shapes every facet of the world that we live in, right? Like, name an institution. There is not an institution that human eroticism does not touch in some way.

15:21So just as those structures influence us, and this is the part that excites me, right, is that it's human eroticism that changes the world. And I think that human eroticism is an understudied or maybe underappreciated motivation for social change, right? And so when I think about erotic dialectics, part of what I'm looking at is this push and pull between the public and private, right? So in some ways, whenever all the deviants, and you know I'm saying that in a, this book is animated by all of the deviants in the best way, right? So when the sex rabble, the sexual rule breakers, you know, are more visible or out in public, right?

16:01Like this month that we're talking is pride, right? Like the more that people are living their authentic, erotic lives, the more that creates change, right? And very often, and then what we see is kind of reactionary. And this is part of what I think is problematic, especially in the current geopolitical moment, is that there are then these kind of knee jerk reactions, right? So more public eroticism. So the more sex, if you will, is in public, the more there are a wide range of entities, religious, governmental, who are like, no, no, no, no, get that shit back in private where it belongs, right?

16:35Because sex is fundamentally something that is supposed to be kind of sacred and private for a lot of people. And there's this ongoing tug of war, push and pull between, you know, sexuality in the public sphere and then those who want to push it back in private. And so for me, I think the title in some ways, hopefully, you know, captures some of those themes. Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. I mean, I think it's successful. Something we've been looking at for quite a bit is libraries and the libraries' reactions to queer media and, you know, it's the lobbying efforts and the activist efforts to push queer life and, I mean, sexuality, honestly, but age-appropriate sex education even to the margins or completely out the door, I think is something that's very—that's something that tears me a lot about the current moment is the ways that these groups are successful in a lot of ways.

17:35They're saying, you know, we don't want to see that in our faces. But it's like, what is in your face the other 11 months of the year? Absolutely. And just I think about all the work that you've done, especially thinking about, I mean, what you're describing as it's taking place online, right? And the amount of kind of shadow banning and censoring and kind of, again, these kind of knee jerk responses to kind of censor and regulate very, very aggressively to keep that stuff out of the public. Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned erotic power and erotic, eroticism as shaping society and shaping history, honestly.

18:13But I think it's such a funny response. And just going back to like title arguments with publishers, not to blow mine up too much, but like, I think everybody has this fucking experience right um but um my my title was house exchange the internet the internet changed sex which is a very it's a big concept um but you know a lot of the response to that was well i think that's overblowing it i'm like i think it's under understating what's going on it's like forget the internet forget the last 40 years let's talk about the last you know like 2000 i think something else you you talked about in the book that i thought was and this is obviously this is a technology website so let's get into tech a little bit but the chapters and the the parts where you touched on um sex toys and consumerism i thought were really interesting i was really excited to read those and and have you talk about the ways that consumerism is sometimes like conflated or confused as like either progress or activism or visibility or whatever it's like because there's so many sex toys in walgreens right now we must be fine no and as far as liberation no we are not where by the way i have to still get an associate to unlock that shit and this is kind of a separate thing but like the ways that sex mediated by technology challenges our views of what is sex which as again as a kid who grew up without a good sex education you know it's like the girls were defining sex in a lot of ways creatively so yeah anyway uh that was several statements and questions in one but like the idea that sex toys and the sex toy market booming is somehow a sign of progress i would just love your thoughts on that and just that industry in general because it is it is so much more normalized which is great of course um so i think first i want to say this is the chapter that in some ways I think, um, shares a lot of affinities and in many ways is a celebration of, of kind of your book.

20:17I think this particular chapter really kind of, um, dovetails so nicely with, with, I think the spirit of your book too, right? And just, I want people to think about how eroticism in this case specifically, um, is shaping kind of capitalist markets and how those markets are also, um, kind of shaping sexuality. Uh, so this is, this actually in some ways also relates to what I was talking about with the dialectics, right? So I want to be very clear to folks, right? Like, this is not, when I talk about erotic dialectics, I'm not imagining some kind of linear, happy story of progress that is bringing us, you know, to some magical, queer, pervert utopia or something, right?

21:00And I think I directly say this at a couple of points in that chapter, that like, make no mistake, this chapter is not some love letter to global capitalism, right? And if anything, what I'm trying to be critical of throughout the book is the way that sexuality and eroticism is constantly being commodified, right? So even if we're making some forms of progress in relationship to sexual liberation, which I can say more about, that progress isn't always rooted in the forms of justice that I would like to see in the world, right? So very often, again, sexuality, as it becomes more public, all of those different forms of sexuality become more public, it is generally often being commodified in ways that exacerbate existing forms of exploitation that are harmful to workers, that are harmful to the environment.

21:49So like, in some ways, I'm like, yay, more sex toys for the humans, right? Like, more pleasure. Great. We're starting to see these as like tools of sexual health. I like that. But also at the same time understand that, you know, your tool of pleasure, your vibrator was likely made by some worker on the 996 in China who's being terribly exploited with delterious impacts on the environment. So I think we need to make space for both of those things. And then I was, well, a lot of the chapters kind of specifically focused on sex toys. I have just become very, very interested in watching the development of sex dolls over time and that particular market and the research that has developed therein.

22:37Yeah, let's get into that. Okay.

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27:33You went through the process and you bought a sex doll. And we're talking about the life-size, like, torso dolls. And you described the process of what it was like having sex with a sex doll. Having sex to a sex doll. Which, again, is all of this kind of language really gets to be challenging because are we talking about sex? and a lot of people would say no that's not sex a lot of people would say yes absolutely that's sex and that's the same way that like teletronics like distance based sex where you're still there's another person involved is that sex is sexting sex there are so many interesting questions and i don't know if there's a prescriptive answer to any of it but the broader we can make this definition the better but the sex doll so crystal right from the alcohol yes right like the champagne very very reminiscent of my strip club days yes uh-huh yes well i hope you put it right like um she actually in some ways that the doll reminded me of this dancer who i was in love with when i worked in the strip clubs in the late 90s and early 2000s shout out to cristal wherever you are in the world um hopefully doing things and making money yeah but even the process of buying this doll was like really i think that was interesting also because there were you wrote that there there were not a lot of options that were like not white, hyper-feminized, hyper-boobied versions of these dolls so you could buy.

28:58So yeah, tell us everything. Absolutely. I'll tell you all the things. But I actually, I first want to start with this question of kind of what is sex, right? And so I think first and foremost, and especially when we talk about technologically mediated sex, folks, it's all sex, right? Like, I think that we need to abandon this definition of sex that's rooted in what scholars call the coital imperative, right? So think PIV, right? I think we need to move away from that definition. It is not inclusive. It is not particularly helpful. And when I say it's not helpful, I don't know how helpful a definition of sex that is just rooted in the coital imperative is helpful for describing the wide range of forms of eroticism that the humans are engaged in, right?