Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Discussion
Are our sexual desires simply innate, or are they at least somewhat shaped by experience, society, and culture? Can they change over time, and if so, how much? Can we ever intentionally change our sexual desires, and can there be cases in which we are obligated to try?
This week, we'll be discussing Amia Srinivasan's ambivalent 2021 essay, The Right to Sex, which is about incels, sexual desire, feminism, and pornography.
KWR kindly requests that minors (those under the age of 18) do not attend this discussion; they will be turned away at the door.
This is presented more as a list of prompts than a promise that we'll discuss all of these questions. If there is sufficient attendance, we may choose to split into two or more groups depending on people's comfort level going up the scale.
Mild
Does it make sense to say that social narratives, including unjust ones, shape our sexual desires? Does this resonate with your personal experience?
Is there anything you disagree with or worry about with the arguments Srinivasan lays out? Are there risks to critiquing desires in this way?
Do we ever have an obligation to change our desires?
Do you think Toggle's framing of sex as inherently destabilizing to authoritarian control is historically accurate?
How do different cultures' sexual norms reflect and reinforce their power structures?
Medium
How often do you consume porn? Is it an amount that you endorse?
Do you think sex is taboo as it should be? Should it be more taboo, or less? In other words, Has Sexual Freedom Gone Too Far?
To what extent can beliefs or desires that originate from problematic sources be made “okay”?
What specific sexual practices do you think are unfairly stigmatized? Which ones do you think deserve more scrutiny?
What's something you used to judge others for sexually that you've changed your mind about?
What specific aspects of pornography have influenced your sexual interests or practices? Do you view those influences as positive or negative?
Spicy
What kinds of sex do you like to have? What kind of sex would you like to have, that you are not having? Why not?
To what extent do your fantasies align with your real-world sexual experiences? Are there things you enjoy fantasizing about that you don't actually want to do in reality?
How do your experiences of giving versus receiving sexual pleasure differ? What influences that dynamic?
Have your sexual preferences changed over time? What influenced those changes?
What sexual experiences have most shaped your understanding of yourself? Your understanding of the world?
What do you think your sexual preferences reveal about your psychology?
Coda
It was my students who first led me to think about this question. Discussing the ‘porn question’ is more or less mandatory in an introductory class on feminist theory. But my heart wasn’t really in it. I imagined that the students would find the anti-porn position prudish and passé, just as I was trying hard to make them see the relevance of the history of feminism to the contemporary moment. I needn’t have worried. They were riveted. Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.
It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically. One young woman pushed back, citing the example of feminist porn. ‘But we don’t watch that,’ the men said. What they watched was the hardcore stuff, the aggressive stuff – what is now, on the internet, the free stuff. My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex that was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission. My women students talked about the neglect of women’s pleasure in the pornographic script, and wondered whether it had something to do with the absence of pleasure in their own lives. ‘But if it weren’t for pornography,’ one woman said, ‘how would we ever learn to have sex?’
Porn meant so much to my students; they cared so much about it. Like the anti-porn feminists of forty years ago, they had a heightened sense of porn’s power, a strong conviction that porn did things in the world. Talking with my graduate teaching assistant after that seminar (she was a handful of years younger than me), I realised what should have been obvious from the start. My students belonged to the first generation truly to be raised on internet pornography. Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been. In that sense, her experience too would have been mediated by a screen: by what the screen instructed him to do. While almost all of us today live in a world where porn is ubiquitous, my students, born in the final years of the last century, were the first to have come of age sexually in that world.
Talking to My Students About Porn, Amia Srinivasan, 2021.
Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.
Discussion
Are our sexual desires simply innate, or are they at least somewhat shaped by experience, society, and culture? Can they change over time, and if so, how much? Can we ever intentionally change our sexual desires, and can there be cases in which we are obligated to try?
This week, we'll be discussing Amia Srinivasan's ambivalent 2021 essay, The Right to Sex, which is about incels, sexual desire, feminism, and pornography.
KWR kindly requests that minors (those under the age of 18) do not attend this discussion; they will be turned away at the door.
Readings
The Right to Sex - Amia Srinivasan (2021)
Voltaire's Prayer - Toggle (2024)
Supplemental Readings
Fetish Tabooness vs Popularity - Aella (2022, chart)
Sex Positive, Porn Critical? - Ozy (2020)
Amia Srinivasan on Utopian Feminism - Tyler Cowen (2021, podcast)
(Additional post-pod reflections by Cowen)
Social Dark Matter - Duncan Sabien (2023)
An important meme compilation - Various (2021)
Discussion Questions
This is presented more as a list of prompts than a promise that we'll discuss all of these questions. If there is sufficient attendance, we may choose to split into two or more groups depending on people's comfort level going up the scale.
Mild
Medium
Spicy
Coda
It was my students who first led me to think about this question. Discussing the ‘porn question’ is more or less mandatory in an introductory class on feminist theory. But my heart wasn’t really in it. I imagined that the students would find the anti-porn position prudish and passé, just as I was trying hard to make them see the relevance of the history of feminism to the contemporary moment. I needn’t have worried. They were riveted. Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.
It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically. One young woman pushed back, citing the example of feminist porn. ‘But we don’t watch that,’ the men said. What they watched was the hardcore stuff, the aggressive stuff – what is now, on the internet, the free stuff. My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex that was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission. My women students talked about the neglect of women’s pleasure in the pornographic script, and wondered whether it had something to do with the absence of pleasure in their own lives. ‘But if it weren’t for pornography,’ one woman said, ‘how would we ever learn to have sex?’
Porn meant so much to my students; they cared so much about it. Like the anti-porn feminists of forty years ago, they had a heightened sense of porn’s power, a strong conviction that porn did things in the world. Talking with my graduate teaching assistant after that seminar (she was a handful of years younger than me), I realised what should have been obvious from the start. My students belonged to the first generation truly to be raised on internet pornography. Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been. In that sense, her experience too would have been mediated by a screen: by what the screen instructed him to do. While almost all of us today live in a world where porn is ubiquitous, my students, born in the final years of the last century, were the first to have come of age sexually in that world.
Talking to My Students About Porn, Amia Srinivasan, 2021.
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