SIO117: Jaclyn Friedman on Yes Means Yes, Feminism, and Sexual Liberation

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 117. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. And today I am very excited to bring you Jaclyn Friedman. She's an author of a few books and some really good articles that caught my attention. We talk about some of them. So, for example, a Vox article she wrote on the Aziz Ansari situation went incredibly viral, very widely read. And also she's been published in the New York Times opinion section on conspiracy theory... consent. She's an excellent writer, thinker, and a perfect person to talk to around this time about me too, and consent, and yes means yes, and and much more. With that said, let's get over to the interview.

0:01:18 Thomas: Jaclyn thank you so much for coming on, it is great to talk to you, so would you mind, for people who aren't familiar, just going into a bit of your background, and how you became interested in writing on the issues you like to write about these days, yeah we've got a while, I'm interested, it's a good,

0:01:22 Jaclyn: Thanks for having me.

0:01:33 Jaclyn: Oh gosh. How long have you got? It really was about kind of weaving the disparate threads of my interests and passions together over the course of my adulthood. So I always was a writer. I, you know, in junior high school would sit out the back of of my house near the pond and like write terrible poetry. And I was editor in chief of my high school literary magazine. So I was always interested in the writing part. And as also always kind of a social justice person, I all found a little two page handwritten paper from when I was in sixth grade about how we shouldn't keep animals in zoos because they have to stay locked up.

You know, I always just was sort of that temperament. So, you know, this is in some ways just the weaving of that together. You Know, the personal part of the story, of course, is I was sexually assaulted in college. In reality, I was already doing activist work around sexual assault on campus before that happened to me, which made it a little jarring. I think that I had thought somewhere in my subconscious that being woke about the issue would mean it wouldn't happen to me.

0:01:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:02:39 Jaclyn: Uh, which turns out is not a thing. Uh. And so that I

0:02:41 Thomas: Wow. Do you think it, do you think it would reduce the chances or make you more aware or is it just something where, you was, it was the circumstances and there's nothing.

0:02:50 Jaclyn: Think I thought I was just too smart. Right. Like, and that I had some subterranean victim blame narrative about how, like, that only happened to girls who were dumb enough to get themselves in the wrong situation. And I thought I think I thought I was too smart to have that happen to me.

0:02:52 Thomas: Hmm, right, right. Yeah, that's interesting.

0:03:09 Jaclyn: Yeah. So it really lit a fire in my belly around sexual assault and, um, did all kinds of activism and education around that through my 20s and as I worked in the field

0:03:23 Thomas: Well, you know, sorry, but before we leave that, can I ask, did you, what was the experience of, did you report it? Was that something you decided to do or not? And I'm sure we we could do a whole episode on, on talking about just that.

0:03:24 Jaclyn: Yeah, Yeah, yeah, I, my story is, uh, very much like lots of other people's stories. I don't tell it that much, not because I am shy about it, it was a long time ago and I'm used to talking about it, but more because it's like so statistically average, um. And I reported it internally to my college. I did not report it to the police. Guy who assaulted me basically, through an emissary, like, basically told me that if I would hear him out, that he would plead no contest to the charges.

Charges, and I had heard lots of horrifying things about what the student judicial system was like and that they would interrogate me about my sexual history and, and that it would be a really terrible process, so that seemed like a fair deal to me. And so I got a dean that I felt comfortable with to be in the room with the two of us, and I sat for a half an hour and a half while he, he told me about his father and his drinking problems and whatever, and cried. And my big victory in that was that I decided going in that I did not want to say to him, "It's OK." Because, you know, that's the girl thing to do, right? If somebody

0:04:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:04:49 Jaclyn: Is saying, Let me tell you about my problems, you want to stay sort of, "There, there." And I knew that I would want to say that on a gut level, and I did, because you just, – it's the training on that is so deep. And I just was like, I'm not going to say that. I told him I'd hear him out, but I'm not going to give him comfort. Uh, and so he did, he pled no contest, um, which meant that he didn't have to go through the judicial process. And he was, he was supposed to have been suspended for a year. This was like midway through, uh, the second semester of my junior year. And so my understanding was that he wouldn't be back until I was gone. And then, I started because of that experience, I started really paying attention to the judicial process, and I started doing activism to pressure the school to deal with how badly the judicial process around sexual assault worked.

0:04:49 Thomas: Right.

0:05:37 Jaclyn: And what do you know, was back on campus first spring semester of my senior year, totally unannounced. So he

0:05:45 Thomas: No one even gave you like a courtesy call or a, wow.

0:05:48 Jaclyn: Was just there. He had a new little golden and retriever puppy, and he was wandering around and I was like, holy, am I not to swear

0:05:56 Thomas: Like he was, yeah, yeah. You can't, I think this circumstance for sure. He was, he was enrolled. Like it wasn't just, he Was on campus. He Was back enrolled and

0:06:01 Jaclyn: Holy shit, yeah. No, He's back, yeah. Um, so, you know, I have no idea what happened there, but I certainly understood it to be retaliation. Specifically, what had happened when they told me that he had been suspended was, they told me also that I was not to speak about the case publicly. And I didn't know they didn't have the right to tell me that. I was, you know, in the middle of trauma. It was like a week or two after it happened. And so I said, OK, OK. You know, and because and I don't want to the details are boring, but the school had some liability that I wasn't even thinking about lawsuits. But they clearly were in retrospect.

0:06:07 Thomas: Wow. Hmm. Yeah right.

0:06:45 Thomas: I mean, it would be a lot to expect out of a student facing trauma to like Like, no, you know, unless you were at law, going to law school and then also experienced it, you know, that's a lot to, for you to have known at the time.

0:06:46 Jaclyn: And yeah. Yeah. So I think they wanted to shut me up. But my response to being shut up is almost always to the opposite. So when I figured out that they didn't have the right to tell me that, I started telling my story everywhere I could. And then boom, he was back on campus.

0:07:08 Thomas: Oh, interesting. So that, you know, and I just see in your writing, you've written a bit about the process on campus, and that's certainly something we could get to. But is there anything more before we move on a to your origin story that people should understand how you accumulated your superpowers.

0:07:10 Jaclyn: Yeah. Yeah.

0:07:31 Jaclyn: Part of the origin story I want to tell is that, know, when I first started doing anti-rape work on campus and right out of college, there was this truism that people said constantly in the movement, which was rape is not about sex. And it's true in the very specific sense in which the term was coined, which is that rape is Not an act of sexual incontinence, right? People don't rape because they're too turned on to contain themselves. It's an act power and violation and dominance. But it had been taken by that point too far. And it really became so that you couldn't talk about rape and sex in the same conversation.

0:08:09 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:11 Jaclyn: It became really taboo. And I really came to understand, the more I did the work and I talked to people, and honestly, the more I read burgeoning feminist blogs in the sort of mid 2000s, is that we really can't address rape culture without addressing the sexual culture at large, because they're the same thing. And we can't talk about sexual violation without also talking about what's good, healthy sex looks like. And in fact, when Jessica Valenti and I put out the call for Yes Means Yes, our anthology that really kicked off the mainstream public conversation about affirmative consent, we heard from a couple of people inside the movement who were basically like, "We're coming for you." And that never materialized, but I was not surprised to get those emails.

0:08:58 Jaclyn: And so I really Think about my work as knitting together two movements that I see as two sides of one coin, as really what should be one movement, which is one, anti-rape movement, and two, what a lot of people call the sex positive movement, which I kind of really hate that phrase. I think of it as movement for sexual liberation. Um, of course, how can you talk about creating a more positive sexual culture without addressing sexual violence and how can you address sexual violence without talking about the sexuality and sexual experiences of survivors, our need for healing, you know, our sexual rights and our sexual humanity. These things are completely tied together, and so my work kind of lives at the intersection of those two movements that really are just one movement, but they don't realize it yet.

0:08:58 Thomas: That's really interesting. Okay. Sorry.

0:09:45 Thomas: Well, that is excellent. One of the last episodes I did, I've had some discussion. I've had a lot of Me Too episodes, but also I decided recently to do a panel discussion on Aziz, and sorry. And I had some reaction to that. Without going into all that, one, I played a message from a female listener talking about how sex positivity, and we can talk about why you don't like that phrase, I'd be curious about that as well, but sex positivity might be a good thing to tie into this because she has said at times she feels pressured by society to not, you know, know, like give in too easily and therefore sometimes might be, be prone to mixing signals because she doesn't want to play into these like, oh, you're being too easy, you're being, you know, that kind of thing, and how that intersects with this conversation. It sounds like that must be something you've thought and written a lot about.

0:10:34 Jaclyn: A lot about, and it goes both ways. You know, when I first started doing this work, I really did a lot of rah, rah, you know, you can be as slutty as you want to be. There's nothing wrong with it. And then I started hearing from young people who were like, you make me feel like I have to have a ton of sex in order to be liberated.

0:10:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:52 Jaclyn: And I, and I, at first my reaction was like, no, I didn't say that. I didn't say anything about that. And then I thought, no, I didn't say anything about that. And so these days I really try and be more balanced, right? The point isn't like how to prove how liberated you are sexually by having the most outre sex life. The point is that you feel genuinely free to make the sexual decisions that work best for you, as long as you're not hurting anyone.

And that's kind of my beef with sex positivity. You know, when Carol Queen coined the phrase, she meant something really specific by it that that I absolutely am for. But the way it gets used sometimes is pretty alienating and can come along with a lot of sort of yay sex cheerleading That's Not trauma informed and doesn't really acknowledge that a lot people don't have positive experiences with sex. And also just the phrase, like I've heard from people when they've heard me say like, I don't know that I'm sex positive, that they feel, they feel more welcome because they don't, because they don't feel like sex has been positive for them. They don't think sex positivity is for them, they think it's about telling them to feel more positive about sex, and some of it is and some of it isn't. There's some amazing work being done under the sex positivity umbrella, but I think we really need to be careful about that conversation not to go too far and make it about the sexual Olympics.

0:11:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:12:14 Thomas: That makes sense. So what's the term you like to use is just sexual liberation. Is that okay?

0:12:18 Jaclyn: Yeah I'm I like to call myself a pleasure activist or also say that I'm working towards sexual liberation or sexual freedom. That's really where I live. And so, yeah, absolutely. I know what that listener means. You know, when after Yes Means Yes came out, I started hearing from all these young women who said, I love the idea of affirmative consent, which I'm guessing if you've done Me Too and Aziz Ansari conversations, you've already covered the basics of what that means. Yes.

0:12:26 Thomas: Right.

0:12:45 Thomas: Yes, but I would not at all trust myself to have covered it well. So I would be, if you don't mind going into it, at least a, you know, at least a bite-sized spiel on it, that would be fine.

0:12:50 Jaclyn: Affirmative Consent at its root is just the responsibility, responsibility that all of us have toward our sexual partners to make sure that they're into whatever is happening between us. It's really that simple. It's really about making sure we're treating our sex partners as equal human people. The rest is details, and we can talk about those details if you want. But the lack of objection is not enough. We all have a responsibility to make sure our sex partner are into whatever's happening. And I would say all decent people only want to have sex with people who are into it. So it's really about just making sure that what you want to be happening is actually happening.

0:13:33 Thomas: I totally agree. That's how I presented it as well. And one thing I want to ask you about, just to see if I have this right, is I keep getting a reaction of, well, what does this mean? Every step of the way I have to be asking someone, you know, like, is that the most common question you get? It, like, do we need to be constantly Verbally Agreeing

0:13:48 Jaclyn: I do get that question enough that like if I got a nickel every Time I'd be pretty rich by now. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of misconception out there that this involves like having a notary involved, like, may I touch your left breast, like, and if that's your kink Like, have fun, but that's not what's involved. Involved. It just involves somebody has a notary kink.

0:13:49 Thomas: Yeah Yeah Yeah I love the notary kink, like, there's got to be one out there, just like Oh, I Love Having like

0:14:10 Jaclyn: Write us in and tell us about your notary kink I want to hear. I'm sure

0:14:10 Thomas: Just A Notary Public Also That's easily by far the most exciting day in the notory public's job, there's not a lot

0:14:19 Jaclyn: The notary is into it too, I want to say. Yeah, not every notary wants to participate in your kink, but yes, I bet there's also a notory who's down for it.

0:14:20 Thomas: Oh Yeah That's Part of Yes means Yes Yeah Yeah

0:14:31 Jaclyn: That's one of the big misconceptions and sort of anti-consent propaganda, honestly, that's out there. That'S not at all what this is about. It's about paying attention to your partner. And a lot of times, especially if it's someone that you know and are familiar with being sexual with, you can read body language. When it's somebody who's a new partner to you, you might have to talk more. But talking is not unsexy.

I mean, the phone industry, the sex industry is still a huge industry, even in the age of the Internet, because talking about sex can be sexy. We have this weird idea in the culture that like we're We're supposed to be thinking and talking about sex at all times, except for with the people we're fucking, which is kind of deranged, right? Like you can just say, do you like that? Right? It's not That hard, right? Does that feel good? I want to do blank. Do you want me to? Like, my advice in general is like just drop your voice an octave. Um, and the other thing about it is, uh, if you say it and it comes out funny and you laugh, that's okay. Like, we also don't have to be so deadly serious about sex too. Sex is weird and silly sometimes, I

0:15:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:43 Thomas: Yeah. You know, I will throw it out there just because I don't want to waste the opportunity of having you on here. I have heard from women, and I do know women in the past who asking is a bit of a turnoff. And I wonder if that's something that is just going to have to be a cost of this. Like if it's just like, well, sorry. It's more important that consent as a whole is, is understood in this way for many, many good reasons.

0:16:11 Jaclyn: Mean You Can negotiate that, right? Like, if You don't want your partner to ask consent, you probably need to set up a safe word, so Something's happening and you need to communicate that it's that you need them to stop immediately, and it could be that you want your safe word to be stop and they will understand like that they have to stop the second you say stop, but you should have a conversation with your partner about it, like, I find it more sexy if you, you know, to be ravished, or, you know, that's a, that's a kink, it's a pretty common kink and there's nothing wrong with it, but the culture doesn't have to conform to your particular kink So you Can find someone who wants to ravish you and negotiate that in advance, that's cool. But you can't approach someone and assume that they have that particular kink.

0:16:21 Thomas: Hmm. Right, right, right.

0:16:58 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Um, also, you know, I I don't want to spend too much time on Aziz again, because I've covered all the, we've talked about it before and I just don't wanna do too many episodes on it.

0:17:06 Jaclyn: Boy, have I talked about Aziz Ansar more than I ever wanted to.

0:17:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. But I, but I also feel like, um, you Know, I Don't want want to, again, waste the opportunity of having you on to talk about it. So would you mind at least briefly outlining what you think a lot of people were missing in that discussion?

0:17:22 Jaclyn: Well, that consent is not like some sort of accomplishment, right? That he basically bullied her into consenting. And that's not real consent, right? You can't just be like, well, you said yes. That's treating sex like a commodity, commodity exchange, where once you shake on the deal, the deal's the deal. If we take the account at face value, and to be fair, Aziz Ansari has not contested any of the details of her account. So I think we have to assume at this point that her account is accurate. And if we assume that, that he was at best wholly uninterested in her as a human person. He was treating her as a masturbatory aid.

0:18:08 Jaclyn: And that's profoundly dehumanizing and violent, quite honestly. I think that people get really hung up on what the law is, but there's a lot of messed up stuff in our laws. In a lot of states, if you've started having sex with someone and they ask you to stop, you can keep going and that's not illegal because you already started to have sex with them, really.

0:18:32 Jaclyn: In a lot of states it's not legal, right? That's, it's still okay. So like using the criminal codes as our moral compass, I think is a really poor idea, um, not, that's

0:18:30 Thomas: Really? Wow, that seems, wow.

0:18:41 Thomas: Right. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, just to add in there, one thing that I totally agree, and I was thinking, you know, a lot the problems with catcalling and that sort of thing, like, that's not illegal, but it just sucks. Like, there's no reason we need to require require something to be illegal to be talking about behavior that, you know, is just not cool.

0:19:04 Jaclyn: Violent and harmful, right? And and the other thing that I heard a lot is, well, how can you call this sexual assault? That diminishes the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. But we understand that categories can have variation in them, right? If I steal a candy bar from a store, we would call that theft. And if I steal $1 million from a company I work for, we would also call that theft. Those aren't the same magnitude of crime, but they are the same type of crime. And I feel like the idea that that saying that this is a form of sexual assault somehow diminishes the impact of, you know, more severe kinds of sexual assault is ludicrous. We're, we all can talk in nuance. I know we're capable of it. A lot of people refuse to, but we can't anybody

0:19:54 Thomas: Yeah, that is a frustrating merry-go-round. You know, you hear that a lot. Oh, this really takes away from the other. It's like, how does that work? Does it take away from it? I don't know. I feel like you're just saying that. I feel Like it doesn't actually take away from it.

0:20:07 Jaclyn: Call for Aziz Ansari to be arrested. I mean, goddamn Harvey Weinstein hasn't been arrested. You know, I think I

0:20:09 Thomas: Right. Yeah. And he should be, by the way. He really should be.

0:20:15 Jaclyn: Really Where is that? You

0:20:18 Thomas: I mean, in some way, I mean, maybe even Kevin Spacey, depending on some of this stuff, I'm just blown away by how, how bad, awful some of the stuff he did.

0:20:18 Jaclyn: Know, absolutely. Yeah, I think Kevin Spacey is protected by the statute of limitations. I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that's true. Oh,

0:20:30 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah, maybe. I don't, yeah, I don'T know. I feel like he was, he active, like right up until, you know, he was outed, it seems like, but I can't imagine.

0:20:39 Jaclyn: Do you think I, I think I haven't heard all the stories, yeah, fuck

0:20:42 Thomas: I mean with how pervasive the behavior sounded like, uh, but who knows? Yeah. But, but, but yeah, that's, that'S an excellent point. And I point out, too, like, Aziz hasn't lost his career. Yeah. Happened. Like, he didn't go to that award show. And when his name was announced, no one cheered for him. So, I mean. It's reasonable to suspect that there's going to be some career implications for this. But what do you think about that? I mean, are we at a level where it's kind of like behavior like this should have those career ramifications or, you know, what are your thoughts on how people are reacting as a whole?

0:20:53 Jaclyn: All, and I think it's okay to not want to hire someone who treats other human beings like that. I mean, I think hiring decisions are are idiosyncratic, and and if you've got other options, why would you want to hire someone who treats other human beings like that? Especially if you've got women on your staff, right? Like, you don't want to have a hostile workplace for women. How would you feel to work with Aziz Ansari knowing this now? You know, if you're a writer or a fellow actor on set, I think that there are a lot of things that have to go into that. It's not necessarily about punishment, although also that there should be consequences for for these actions does not seem to me either. He's not getting locked up. He is going to be all right.

0:22:04 Thomas: Yeah. You you know one thing I read in your vox article that I thought was fascinating, was the difference between Brock Turner and this Westlake case. Actually, I don't know if I'm familiar with the case. So if you want to give a just a tiny summary of that. And could you go into that? Because I found that distinction very interesting. It has to do with sex education, I think, and how we're teaching things in this country.

0:22:27 Jaclyn: Yeah, it's not the Westlake case. It's a Steubenville case. The kid in question, his last name is Westlick. Yeah, so I compare two cases and straight up, like, you know, these are just two cases. This is not a scientific study. But there's a case a few years ago, probably five years ago now because time is marching on, where these two high school boys, they were big shot football players on the high school team, dragged this semi-conscious girl. She had a lot of alcohol from party to party and violated her in front of their friends. And the friends did nothing. Possibly their friends cheered them on. They certainly didn't intervene.

And on the stand, one of the bystanders, one of the friends, so he didn't commit the assault, but he saw the assault, they asked him why he didn't do something and he said, "I didn't know that's what rape looked like. I thought rape was this violent thing. And what did I see? I saw my buddies doing sex things to a woman, to a girl who wasn't protesting." Right, and And if you think about the way we frame sexuality, you know, in the dominant culture, it is that sort of women are being consumed by men model, right? Women are the commodity and men are the buyers. If you contrast that with the Brock Turner case, where these two guys came along, another guy, there was only one guy in this case who is acting sexually upon a woman who is not moving or doing anything, a very similar dynamic, they looked at it and said, "That looks like rape to us," and

0:22:33 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Okay. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah,

0:24:07 Jaclyn: We need to intervene. And, you know, so, again, these are just two cases, who can know what all the differences are, but I think one of them is that the two guys who intervened in the Brock Turner case were raised in Sweden, where they have comprehensive K through 12 sex education that involves talk about healthy sexuality and relationships and affirmative consent and all of that stuff. And so they knew that if you see somebody being acted upon sexually and they're just laying there passively, that's not consent. So that's no sex.

0:24:07 Thomas: Yeah. Mm hmm.

0:24:37 Jaclyn: That's not OK. That's a violation. Whereas this kid, the kid on the stand, you know, he was raised in American culture. I don't know what kind of sex ed he got or if he got any. But at best in U.S. public schools, you get very brief lessons on what are what's often called disaster prevention sex ed, which is basically here's how to not get a disease or get pregnant. Right.

0:25:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:01 Jaclyn: You don't get all those lessons about what healthy sexual interactions are like. And so it really profound. It could profoundly shift our culture if we taught real sex education in our public schools. Have

0:25:06 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And is again, as you said, it's not an experiment. It's not data or anything. It is one example. But I thought it was such a great example for you to pick up on of the differences between yes means yes and no means no. Like it's, you know, like that's such a stark difference. You know, when knowing that someone needs to be actively consenting and participating versus, well, they weren't, it's not like they were fighting. So, you know, I guess I didn't notice that it was rape particularly. It seems like such a profound thing. And it seems like such an important thing that I, it really, I guess my next question is, have you seen, as a part of this Me Too conversation, any attempt by anybody to, in any serious way, maybe, I don't know, federalize some sort of sex education standards or anything like that? Exactly right.

0:26:10 Jaclyn: You noticed who is in control of the federal government right now? I

0:26:13 Thomas: Yeah. I know, I know, it's, I know it's incredibly unrealistic, but can't talk about that, like, what, what could we be doing if, you know, we wanted to

0:26:22 Jaclyn: Think we should actually be doing is working to improve sex education on the local level right now. Honestly, even under Obama, it was very difficult to think about federalizing sex ed. It's a giant mess And it's a mess, not only because of the toxic sexual culture in the U.S., but also – and the sort of hold the religious right has on a lot of our government, but also because of the way public education is set up, literally, like in terms of who would pay for the teacher training and where would we get hours in the day to add to the curriculum something that's not on the tests, the state tests. And, you know, public education in the U.S. has many, many problems that go beyond sex ed and make this hard to fix on a federal level. And what that means right now is that you literally need like an advanced degree to map out what's happening in sex ed in all the different states. It's just like an absolute, chaotic mishmash.

0:26:27 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:22 Jaclyn: Most of it is terrible. It's juste like varying degrees of terrible. But what we could do, all of us, everybody listening to this who lives in the U.S., could go to their local school board and say, you know, what's being taught? Can we improve what's been taught? Could we be teaching consent? Could we teach sexual communication and healthy boundaries and, you now, all that stuff? You know, if you work on it on the school board level, it's a lot easier to find a win than right now going up against the Trump administration, which seems like tilting at windmills at the moment.

0:27:53 Thomas: No. Yeah. Absolutely. You're Right, I mean that, it was, it was a very uh fantastic notion.

0:28:00 Jaclyn: I would love it. I'm not against it, but I'm also very realistic when it comes to activism. And I think the win right now is the local levels.

0:28:02 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, which is so frustrating. So it's like, okay, hopefully some people in some states will know how to not rape people, but we can't speak for all the rest of the states. Oh, man. It feels depressing. But you know what? You sound like such a positive person. How are you able to maintain your positivity in the face of all these issues? Which we, again, the idea that it's a laughing stock, you know, that like, it's just absolutely laughable that we would have any sort of federal standards for, for something like that. You know, how do you stay positive in the face of what we're going through?

0:28:18 Jaclyn: Right. Exactly. But yeah. Yeah, I have a very philosophical optimism and I have to give props to Rebecca Solnit's book Hope in the Dark for helping me frame it. Although I think temperamentally I was already leaning that way, which is not to say that I think everything's going to be OK. And I, you know, have had a lot of really crappy days lately watching the public conversation around sex and consent and sexual assault be so remedial. I'm just going to say remedial, I um, don't always feel happy and great, but what I do have is I've made a logical decision to stay optimistic. Because if I decide everything is hopeless and stop trying to change things, then the outcome is known, right? The best case is what we already have and probably things will get worse. If I decide that the future is not yet known and things could change for the better if we keep trying to figure out how to do that, then the future, the future of the world, the world of the future.

0:28:53 Thomas: Hmm.

0:29:48 Jaclyn: The future is literally not yet know if I make a different decision. So it's not a temperament. So it's a decision. I think it's the logical way to go about it.

0:29:55 Thomas: Yeah. And I suppose, do you take signs of hope from, you know, as, as clunky as a lot of the public discussion has been, Me Too, on the whole, I mean, do you, do take that as a sign of hope? Do you have, have uh, do you think, you know, we have any chance of learning the right lessons from it, or what do you think about Me Too as a as a public moment? Hmm.

0:30:20 Jaclyn: You know, I don't try to predict the future, and I appreciate that you haven't asked me to. Many people have been like, is this going to be the turning point? And I don'T know. But I think IT CAN be, depending on how we continue to play it. And I think a lot of great things have happened so far. I'm really encouraged by Time's Up, which is the collaboration between Hollywood actors and actresses and, you know, farm workers and service workers. I think that is some real deep organizing happening there with a lot of power behind it, which Is a combination you don't get a lot.

And I'm also just really encouraged By the tenaciousness of folks who are participating in Me Too. You know, every time there's a new story, you know, people come out of the woodwork to say, oh, now things have gone too far and this will be the end of Me Too. They're going to be a laughingstock. And enough people are continuing to say nope, nope, we're not going back, that we seem to keep steamrolling over those naysayers. I am encouraged. I'm also just really enjoying the catharsis of women's collective anger and the number of women who are just out of fucks.

0:30:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:39 Jaclyn: It does brighten the mood some days for sure.

0:31:44 Thomas: I can imagine. I mean, I, I can't imagine personally, but I, I just had uh another uh message I played from a female listener on the last episode that was, it was uh, it really deserved a standing ovation because she was certainly out, out of fucks to give, I should say. But yes, no, that's really cool. And I does seem like there is, predictably, as you alluded to, every time, every new big revelation, there's the article by the second wave feminist of, no. This is too far, or something.

0:32:12 Jaclyn: No, no, no. No, Those women by and large are not feminists, and we're not. Part of the second wave just because they're older women does not make them second wave feminists.

0:32:23 Thomas: Well, there have been some though, right? Or am I just wrong in that? Well, you don't think any of them that have spoken out were ever part of a feminist movement like in the 70s and 80s?

0:32:32 Jaclyn: People can call themselves whatever they like, but I'm having a hard time coming up with someone who is genuinely part of the second wave who's spoken out against Me Too.

0:32:41 Thomas: Okay, so then what what is happening? Because seemingly, there is at least an article every time of a woman who represents herself as, hey, I'm a feminist, and this feminism has gone too far. What do you make of that? I mean, is it something you think we're overcoming? Is it inevitable? What would have been your feelings on that?

0:33:00 Jaclyn: It has always sold newspapers and clicks and advertisements to have women say anti-feminist things. It has always made money for news outlets. So it is doing so again now. It's not new or interesting to me, honestly. And I think also a lot of these media outlets are run by men who are watching their colleagues get brought down by Me Too and maybe are worried about themselves. And so they're also eager to publish these things. But I don't see it having a lot lot of impact. I have feared on several moments that it might, but I haven't actually seen those arguments take hold yet. But

0:33:41 Thomas: Yeah, I hope you're right. But yeah, no, that's interesting. Now I'm interested to look more into it and see if these are mainly for, I guess, purposes of sales, males have been representative as, as second wave feminists and aren't actually, that's, that's interesting.

0:33:57 Jaclyn: A lot of them have represented themselves as feminists. Either Caitlin Flanagan has never been a feminist. Bari Weiss maybe calls herself a feminist but has not been a movement person. Like, I don't know who you mean. I do think that there's a lot of confusion online and in kind of the Twitter discussion, and I see younger feminists calling these women second wave feminists. And I don't know why they're doing that. I think there's a certain amount of ageism in that, like, oh, these people are making arguments I don't like. They must be part of that older generation. But I don't see a lot of evidence that actual second wave feminists are participating in this.

0:34:01 Thomas: Hmm.

0:34:34 Thomas: Well, I'm really glad you've pointed that out. I'll have to be more careful in, uh, in how I look at those things. Um, okay. Yeah, no, Bari Weiss is certainly one of the people I had in mind. I think, I think part of the sales tactic is to say, yeah, I'm a feminist, but you know, that kind of thing. Um. But, but I, I don't know, I guess I don'T know know how, you sincere they're being when they, when they say that.

0:34:53 Jaclyn: Right. I mean, anybody, you know, that the deals, but there's this guy who's running for Senate somewhere, I don't remember, who just a couple of days ago went on a rant about how, like he

0:34:55 Thomas: Oh, that video or whatever. Yeah. I don't think I, that's

0:35:02 Jaclyn: Needs to have women on dinner on the table and, you know, when he gets home and

0:35:07 Thomas: A second wave feminist. No, I'm just kidding.

0:35:07 Jaclyn: No. But he said, I'm all for women's rights, but this is ridiculous, right? It's so easy, everyone says, oh sure, I'm for women's rights, but then you gotta ask them, what rights they're for.

0:35:18 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right, exactly. Well, you Know, I had a couple of listener questions that I wanted to run by you about, yeah, awesome, about when I mentioned that you had written a lot about yes means yes and stuff that questions of how do you treat, I mean, one of the things that's part of this, you know, hopefully an awakening in how we're dealing with consent is alcohol and how that plays a part. And I wonder if you could talk a bit about, you knows, how we navigate the difference between, okay, you're at a bar and, you know, people drink because they get anxious to meet new people. They get nervous, you Know,

0:35:24 Jaclyn: Yeah, I love listener questions. Sure.

0:35:57 Thomas: Blurring the lines between how, how do you know when it's, when it's okay. And, and when it reaches a line where it's like, okay this person can't consent versus, you know some sort of really dramatic policy of, you know, any drop of alcohol, no consent kind of thing. What are your thoughts on that?

0:36:14 Jaclyn: This is my, my most popular question. Absolutely. Absolutely. So a couple of things. One, there is no line. So you're asking where the line is, where you can get away with sex. You're asking kind of a rapey question. Right. So no, no, I'm not saying I've just been asked this question in a lot of forms. And so I'm going to give you the fullness of the answer. Her.

0:36:16 Thomas: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Hmm. I hope you didn't take it that way. But yeah, but I see your point. Right. That's good.

0:36:43 Jaclyn: Idea that there's some line, and if I can just stay one hair on this side of the line, I'm cool, is inherently a question about "what can I get away with?" And that's a rapey attitude towards sex. You may or may not be a rapist, but that's rapey. And so I think that's one of the rapy attitude, right? Your attitude towards sex should be, is this going to be an enjoyable, enjoyable collaboration for both or more of the people who are involved. Right.

And so am I able to, am I, am I too drunk or impaired to show up and pay attention to my partner the whole time we're interacting? Is my partner too impaired to fully know what's going on and to really be in their right mind to know what and communicate with me about what's coming on? And if you're not sure, that's your answer, not because the law is going to come after you, although it's illegal in a lot of places, um, you know, depending on how much you've had to drink, but because morally, hopefully everyone listening to me is a person who doesn't want to hurt anybody while they're having sex, who only wants to have sex with people in good situations, right? And so why take that risk? Right, on the one hand, if you don't have sex, you don't have sex, which maybe is a kind of a bummer.

But if that person really wants to have sex with you, they'll have sex with you later when they're more sober or you're more sober. And on the other hand, you risk really hurting someone, profoundly traumatizing someone. It doesn't seem like that complicated a choice to me. So, no, of course. And I do think that people go too far and say, if you've had any alcohol at all, you shouldn't have sex.

0:38:16 Jaclyn: And that's obviously weird and unrealistic. A lot of us have a drink to loosen up if we're nervous. And that's perfectly human. And I've had plenty of sex while buzzed. And it's been fun. Also, some of it's fun anyway. You know, if you have questions, if You're starting to ask yourself, are they okay? Am I okay? That's your answer. Because you're a moral human person.

0:38:42 Thomas: Yeah, I I'm glad you answered from the from the rapey aspect. But I also think there's a good faith worry that maybe I don't know, maybe some men have, which is like, what if I'm in a situation where it seems, you know, someone seems as though they're consenting and I don't know them. I don't know what they're like when they're sober. I don't know what they're like when they're drunk. They seem to be consenting. I think there's a nervousness that it's like, is there, is this some sort of trap where I find out, oh, they actually were under the influence and, you know, they regret it the next day. I mean, sure.

0:39:11 Jaclyn: You can ask them and talk to them. How much have you had of what? Like use words. Words, it's It's you Can

0:39:15 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Use words, but, uh, I suppose that is is an obvious answer, isn't it? I Love

0:39:24 Jaclyn: Communicate With them, there's A very, uh, common joke among sex educators that that the answer to every question we get asked is either communication or lube. Um, why

0:39:35 Thomas: It, I hope I don't use the wrong one when it's like, oh, shoot, what was the answer here, was It Lube Or Yeah Just lube up and then ask, is that what you're saying?

0:39:39 Jaclyn: Don't You Just Use Both. Yes. So

0:39:44 Thomas: Communicate, yeah, oh, that's funny.

0:39:47 Jaclyn: Yeah, if you're, if you're worried it's a trap, then use your words and communicate. Like, how much have you had to drink? Are you really okay? Hey, have you taken any drugs? You can, you can Speak to human people, crazy

0:39:57 Thomas: Suppose There is always the option of using human words with with humans. I guess you're right.

0:40:05 Jaclyn: It's this radical idea. I mean, look, I have a lot of empathy for this, because all we see in the media is at best what my friend, uh, the writer Bear Bergman, calls the magnet, the magnetic noses moment, you know, which is like where two people just like their noses touch and they look deeply into their eyes and each other's eyes and they fall into each other's arms and then they have this beautiful sex, sex wordlessly, right? And the idea is, like, that's the only way to be sexy, but it's just bunk.

0:40:35 Jaclyn: You have to talk to each other. Well,

0:40:30 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's true. Portrayal of sex on TV and movies is just not, most of the time, not it, I don't think. What do you think about that? I mean, how much of this is a culture change? Do we need to start portraying these things in our art better so that, you know, that we're learning from the right things? Some

0:40:57 Jaclyn: For sure, we need absolute culture change. And you know who's making those pictures? Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen, right, and I'm sorry for that matter, right. Like, so, you know, we needs to have different people in charge of what gets made in order to fix that problem.

0:41:06 Thomas: Yeah, that's true. We had the rapist in charge of making that art. So that's a good point. Right.

0:41:16 Thomas: What about, because people put a lot of the blame sometimes on porn on this. And I have wondered if, I mean, when it comes to porn, I almost wonder, is that more influential? Or is it the stuff that's portrayed as like, no, this is normal sex? You know, because I think most people can understand, you know, porn isn't sex. Like, I would hope most people could understand in porn is porn, it's a fantasy, it's a, it oftentimes really not well done fantasy, but is, is it, I wonder if the stuff portrayed in TV and movies is like, no, this is real people, you know, like, is, could that be more harmful? Hmm.

0:41:54 Jaclyn: Separating out porn is actually a false dichotomy, right, because, because porn is just another form of media and there's crappy porn and there is good porn and there's feminist porn and misogynist porn. The problem is that the kind of porn that's available really easily for free on the internet is mostly the lowest common denominator crap porn. And for a whole bunch of economic reasons that I write about in my book Unscrewed, which I can get into to if you want to, but it's like very-

0:41:57 Thomas: I- Did- want to get into, but I'm, so sorry, I didn't lead- off with that, but yes, go ahead. Yeah.

0:42:25 Jaclyn: It's- Like a whole conversation we- can come back around to, that if you won't, but let me finish the thought. So you have this lowest common denominator crap porn that has this really crap ideas about what sex is and the relationship between women and men around sex and thinks that sex, the arc of sex is like men's arousal and orgasm. And you put that up against are absolute crap sex ed, and you have 12 year olds turning to porn to figure out sex, right? And so you can say, sure, we all understand that's a fantasy, but I don't think your average 12 year old does. But I don't think that's because porn as a genre is bad. It's because the kind of porn that's available free on the internet is crap and we don't teach sex ed. Imagine if we taught sex ed in every grade starting in kindergarten, age appropriate, of course.

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:43:19 Jaclyn: And as part of it, we taught when it became age appropriate porn literacy. And we talked about, well, who makes porn? What kinds of porn? And when you're looking at that, you know, like those aren't positions that most people have sex in. Those are positions that look good on camera. Or, you know, actually, you need a lot of lube and communication to have anal sex and not everyone wants to do it. And, you you know, like those sorts of conversations. But that requires us to have sex ed. So this would

0:43:38 Thomas: Boy. That would be great. We, I think we would really be living in a better world if that was something we could incorporate into our curriculum.

0:43:53 Jaclyn: Be the kind of world where we could talk about porn, where we Could say, oh, I don't like that porn. That's crap porn. I like this other porn over here. The way we talk about TV and movies, and we can say, I like This portrayal here, I don't like what the message is here. Be able to say, ah, I saw the best porn last night. Let Let me tell you about it.

0:44:00 Thomas: Yeah. I just binged this seven-part series on, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, tell us about your new book, Unscrewed. And I'm sure we've probably covered some of the topics, but tell us what more we can find

0:44:16 Jaclyn: Yeah, the idea behind Unscrewed is that we've been sold an idea of female sexual empowerment that's all based on the individual, that if an individual woman, you sees Fifty Shades of Grey or takes a pole dancing class or buys this particular product or listens to this kind of music, then she'll be empowered sexually. She'll be a powerful woman and she'll have sorted that all out for herself. I call that faux powerment. It's really an appealing idea because it doesn't rely on the hard work of culture change to actually get free.

0:45:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:45:02 Jaclyn: But It's a total trap. And the story I tell in the introduction that I think illustrates it the best is the story of this woman who had some body image issues. She didn't feel good about how she looked. And a friend of hers suggested that she do a boudoir shoot, do a sort of a sexy photo shoot. And so she could see how sexy she looked, and so she did that, and she loved it. And she saw those pictures and she felt better about herself, and she even felt good enough to show them to her boyfriend, and he thought they were really sexy. And that's where the faux powerment narrative usually leaves off. Yay, she decided to be more powerful and throw off her hangups and now everything's great. But what happened after that is they eventually broke up. He felt bitter about it and released her photos non-consensually on the internet. She was deluged with rape and death threats to the point where she was suicidal and didn't want to leave her house.

0:45:02 Thomas: Oh, geez. Wow. Well,

0:45:56 Jaclyn: So that's not sexual freedom. It's not sexual freedom until we live in a world where A, your spurned ex-boyfriend doesn't think it's cool to just release your photos non-consensually and B, if there are sexy pictures of you on the internet, like random men threaten you until you become a shut-in. That's not liberation. In order to actually have sexual liberation, we have to change the systems and institutions that impact our sex lives. And that's a hard conversation because people don't want to think about the fact that we are hemmed in by systems and institutions, but we really are. And so each chapter takes a look at one of those systems and institutions, what's going wrong with it, how it could be better, and also profiles somebody who I think is doing good work to move the ball forward in that area.

0:46:44 Jaclyn: Because I want people to leave the book feeling like they have an idea of the many ways that change is possible and not just that that things are messed up. So there's chapters on the media for sure, and on capitalism slash neoliberalism, and on science and the way science studies and talks about and frames female sexuality, and chapters on masculinity and sex ed and the internet and all manner of things that have real impacts on our sexuality and that we can't just decide our way out of, at least not on the individual level. Yeah.

0:47:16 Thomas: That sounds really fascinating. I also want to echo, you know, I do another podcast that's actually a law podcast with a Harvard grad lawyer, and we did an episode on revenge porn laws, and We really need more revenge porn porn laws. Like it's not even there are many I'm sure you already know this having written the book, but there there are states where it's Not even a crime like it's, it's it's sickening really to think of how much is not a crime when it comes to that. So that's, that's excellent. I look forward to reading about that.

0:47:43 Jaclyn: Yeah. Do you want me to tell you the story about uh why our porn is so crappy with the free porn on the internet?

0:47:46 Thomas: Hmm, it, does it relate to the butterfly effect by Jon Ronson? Have you heard that?

0:47:55 Jaclyn: Surely, um, so basically the answer is this. There was this company originally called ManWin, and I am not making that up, ManWin was the name. It's now called MindGeek, but originally it's called ManWin. In the early days is the internet, figured out that porn would be an awfully good business to get into on the internet.

0:48:16 Thomas: Smart. Yeah.

0:48:18 Jaclyn: And they did this in this sort of diabolical way by stealing a bunch of content, both getting amateurs to upload their own content, but also stealing content from porn production houses and posting it for free on their sites, on the Man Win sites, and selling ads up against it. So nobody had to pay for the porn. They just got advertised to. And what that did was it sort of created this avalanche effect in which it became harder to sell your porn on the internet, to get people to pay for it, because they could get this other stuff for free, and devalued the, you know, the price of it enough so that the porn production houses wound up feeling like they had to advertise. They had to pay ManWin to advertise their own products up against their own stolen content.

0:49:07 Jaclyn: And then it devalued the porn production companies enough eventually that ManWin bought up a bunch of those and got into the porn-production business. Business. And so at the moment, MindGeek, formerly ManWin, has a near monopoly over what are called the tube sites, which are the free sort of aggregate Porn sites that you find on the internet. So RedTube and YouPorn and all of that stuff, you think those are all different sites, but they're all owned by the same company. And a lot of the companies that produce porn for them are also owned by this same company, and this company is just solely interested in making money. They're interested in selling widgets. And so, of course, they're not hiring people to write thoughtful porn.

They're just turning out lowest common denominator, like replicating the dominant paradigm about sex. You know, a lot of racist stuff, super misogynist stuff, really ableist and transphobic and all that crappy stereotype stuff, because they genuinely just want to make a bunch of products so they can sell ads against it. That is the very short story. It's it's longer in the book, but that is why free internet porn is so bad.

0:49:25 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:50:14 Jaclyn: Reason they're not to have this monopoly is that there's a taboo against talking about porn, right? Like, what politician is gonna, like, take on porn you know what I mean? Like, right, exactly, like that, because we're so teehee and afraid of talking about it that that's why they're allowed to get away with having this near monopoly.

0:50:19 Thomas: I demand better porn. Stump speech. Yeah. That's interesting.

0:50:34 Jaclyn: And it actually makes the porn performers Lives crappier too, because a lot of the structures that require that porn producers make sure that their performers are tested and are of age and have workplace protections and all of that. A lot of that, again, because of the shady way that porn operates, because it's so taboo, that gets required by the credit card processing companies, um, that they use to sell the porn. And of course, ManWin, MindGeek, is not using credit card processing companies on the client end, um, so they don't need to, so it actually makes the porn performers' lives a lot harder, and it makes the the industry more ripe for abuse on that end as well. Yes.

0:51:19 Thomas: Yeah. It's shocking actually how little money there is in porn for the performers.

0:51:26 Jaclyn: That did not used to be so. Sorry.

0:51:26 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Where should we be going for our porn? Can we end with the recommendation section?

0:51:34 Jaclyn: Um. I like, uh, Erika Lust is a producer that I really like, uh, Pink and White Productions makes really good queer feminist porn that I dig, um but, you know, I, everybody's really different, and I also, I don't watch a ton of porn if I'm being perfectly honest. I like erotica, by which I mean written porn as opposed to filmed porn, porn um, so I'm not like the world's biggest connoisseur, just

0:51:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:52:01 Thomas: Yeah, good recommendations, some good picks there when it comes to, I guess, if you want to be like the conscientious consumer, then not Red RedTube, and Pornhub. Is that what you're saying?

0:52:15 Jaclyn: Pay for your porn, just start finding a place that makes porn that you like and give them money, and that would be a great step in the right direction.

0:52:16 Thomas: Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Seems like the least we could do. I mean, they are going through a lot for us sometimes. So that's excellent. And once again, the book is Unscrewed. Is there anything that you want to make sure to get to that we didn't have a chance to before we call it a day here?

0:52:22 Jaclyn: Yeah. Yeah, oh,

0:52:41 Thomas: I mean there is a a lot

0:52:40 Jaclyn: My gosh, I mean, I feel like I could talk about this stuff for hours, um, which is why I literally write books about it, but I think we've covered so much. So thanks for asking great questions, um, and if you feel like we missed out, I'll come out on again, again, if you like.

0:52:42 Thomas: Yeah oh I would love that. I, I think there's much more we can talk about, and inevitably there will be another news blow up where a bunch of people have some horrible takes and. So once again, Jaclyn Friedman, thank you so much for coming on. The book is called Unscrewed. I encourage people to check it out and thank you again for being generous with your time.

0:52:58 Jaclyn: Yeah. Yeah, oh, thanks for having me.

0:53:22 Thomas: More big thanks to Jaclyn. That was fascinating. I learned a ton. Lots to talk about there. With that said, I have lots of good interviews saved. I have several coming up. Don't know specifically what I'm going to do for Thursday, but I like to keep things open in case the world ends or any such nonsense like that. But I also, I think I have a good number of voicemails to talk about. I can always use more. So if you've got opinions about this conversation, feel free to call in, but we'll see. I'm playing an audible for Thursday, but lots to come in the show. Great interviews already recorded. I'm so excited to bring them to you. With that said, I'll just have to see you whenever I see you.

0:54:28 Thomas: Jaclyn, so, oh, I was gonna just go into it, no, don't, okay, yeah, now I'll just leave all that in, no I'm just kidding,

0:54:28 Jaclyn: Unless you want me to stop and start again. Oh, I'm sorry. Never mind. Let me just let you do your thing. Oh