Factually! with Adam Conover - The Philosophy of Good Sex with Quill R. Kukla

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Consent has been the focal point of discussions around sex in our society, and rightly so. But consent is, or should be, the bare minimum. Philosopher Quill R. Kukla joins me to examine how we can prioritize not just consent, but agency, and dare I say...pleasure? SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again as I talk to an incredible thinker about all the amazing ideas that they have. I know your mind is going to be blown by this conversation. Mine certainly was because this one is really fascinating. You know, America struggles to talk about sex as a society. We refuse to have even the most basic conversation about it in a real way.

And when we do try to have that conversation, it's super rigid. fearful and limited. I'll give you an example. Over the last decade, the pillar of sex education has become consent and then affirmative and enthusiastic consent.

That has been the thing that we have impressed upon people over and over again. Consent is essential. And it is, obviously, absolutely. I mean, isn't consent just kind of table stakes for sex, right? Like, isn't it the absolute minimum

that we should ask for? I mean, sure, if you have consent, then you can have sex without literally committing a crime, but, you know, sex isn't just about that. It's also can be good or bad, great or weird. You could leave it feeling awesome or feeling bad about yourself. And all of that can happen after you have crossed over, that low bar of consent. So, you know, we should put a little more thought into it than that, right? What can we actually do to make sex good and fulfilling and a positive experience for everyone involved? What could we do to reduce the potential harms of a sexual

encounter other than simply making sure consent is present? And, you know, once you start thinking about it, what other kinds of conversations could we be having as a society for how we could get more out of sex, both individually and on a cultural level? I mean, sex is absolutely fundamental to the human experience. So why do we have so much trouble talking about it? And if we were to have a real conversation about it, how much better could it be? All these questions are the subject of a new book by one of my favorite philosophers, Quil Kukla. Phil is a professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University.

And, you know, I'd have them on the show to talk about anything. This is not their first time on the show. Now, you might think that sex is a little bit weird of a subject for a philosopher. But think about it. The questions of, what is ethical behavior? What do we owe to each other socially? What's a violation? What is a positive experience?

And what does it mean for an experience to be good? Well, those are some of the basic and classic questions of philosophy, right? I mean, Socrates and Plato asked, what is the good life? So another philosopher might ask, what makes a good orgasm, right? It's a good question. That, in not so many words, is the subject of Quill's new book, which is called Sex Beyond Yes, pleasure and agency for everyone. I absolutely love this book.

It helped me think about sex in a new, more fulfilling, more thoughtful, more full way I know you're going to love this conversation. Before we get to it, I just want to remind you if you want to support the show and every single conversation we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover, five bucks a month. Gets you every episode of the show ad-free. We'd also love to have you as part of our wonderful and welcoming online community. And now, let's get to this week's interview with Quill Ku Klukla.

Quill, thank you so much for coming on the show again. Thank you for having me back. I'm really delighted to have you in person. I love the book. I was really happy to have the chance to read it. You're a philosopher. How common is it for philosophers to write about sex and this much depth? Because I certainly never encountered the topic in my bachelor's education in philosophy.

Yeah, I don't think it's common at all. There is actually now a growing trend of philosophers writing about sex and consent. But it's been a frustrating literature for me to read because it tends to stay. still be very dry and abstract and analytical and what I think of as bloodless. And I feel like sex is such a messy issue that you're not going to actually make any really interesting substantive progress unless you're willing to sort of get down in the mucky, messy details of it. And philosophers don't like to do that.

So I do think this is an unusual book for a philosopher to write. It's really funny that philosophers don't do that more often because when I think about like, you know, the stuff you do, you know, the sort of Plato and stuff. Socrates stuff in philosophy 101. It's often very much about like the muck of life and how do you make good decisions and what is, et cetera. And consent seems like a perfect topic for, you know, a philosophical approach because it's like, okay, what do we what do we owe to each other morally, ethically, socially, outside

of the bounds of law or, you know, some other sort of frame of reference, just like, let's figure out what we owe to each other. And I just find that approach really useful. And I also think it's really interesting that this struck me as both a work of philosophy for philosophers and also just like you could buy this at a sex shop, right, in the literature section and be like, oh, I learned a lot of good stuff about how to organize my next sexual encounter. Right. And make sure everybody's well taken care of and et cetera. Like it felt it felt very approachable for a lay reader too. Thank you because that was really the goal.

I just really didn't want a book to write a book that was. was off-puttingly abstract or jargony in any way. I wanted to use my philosophical toolbox, my philosophical training to write something that was really going to be for anybody who wants to be genuinely thoughtful about these issues with no particular special background. Well, it was funny as we talk about consent so much

in the last 10 years. I feel like it's been a very, obviously, hot topic of conversation in the Me Too era and everything else. And yet the conversation is so shallow at the same time. Like the beginning of your book really made me realize that, like, consent obviously an important word, but we have put, we've made it do so much work that maybe it is not up to the task of. So what is your overall sort of critique of the way we normally, like, think about consent in these issues? Yeah, I think that consent has gotten way too much air time, not because it's not in. but because we've ended up reducing the entire conversation about the ethics of sex to what's

imagined as this one very narrow moment where somebody usually imagined as a man requests sex from somebody else usually imagined as a woman. And then the woman's, you know, best, you know, her range of possibilities, ideally is that she gets to either say yes or no. And that's, first of all, not the way that most good sex starts. Sometimes it is. But I think that when we think about the really hot encounters we have, it's very rare that what that came down to was one person requesting sex from somebody else and the other person kind of saying, okay.

It's not an especially sexy way for sex to start. It also leaves the person saying yes or no with this incredibly impoverished kind of agency. Like all they get to do is agree to something. that somebody else suggested or not agree to something that somebody else suggested. And it all kind of happens right at the beginning, right? Like we imagine that you sort of say, can I do sex to you? Yes. And then we have no discussions about what happens after that or how to make it good or what

the ethical concerns are during or how to end the sexual encounter. So it just doesn't give us any tools to talk about anything beyond at most that first moment of initiation. So I think it's really impoverished the conversation. Yeah. We haven't had any kind of rich education or conversations about what do you do after somebody says yes if they say yes. You know, now what, like what kind of sex are we going to have?

How are we going to check in with each other and make sure it's good for both of us? How are we going to build something together that we both enjoy? How are we going to know when it's time to stop? How are we going to stop without hurting each other's feelings? What do we owe to each other afterwards? Consent conversations just don't give us any insight. insight into any of that. It's just very, it's important, but extremely narrow. As soon as you bring this up, it's clear how much is left out. I mean, first of all, the way that

it sort of enforces this, you know, male aggressor, request, or dynamic, you know, I had not really thought of, and we'll get to that. But, yeah, it's also such a bare minimum, right? The bare minimum is, is this okay, yes. But that, okay, so, so you've, so you've, you're on, if you do that, you're on pretty sure footing that you're not committing a crime at that moment. Exactly. And that's about it. Right. But it doesn't say, how do we have sex that is going to be good, that's going to feel nice,

that's going to leave nobody with hurt feelings, that people are going to feel positively about. And those are all the things that I would be concerned with having sex, right? Right. It's not just like, have I jumped through a legalistic coop. Right. And then the other piece of it is, even if you say, okay, it's a bearer, minimum, and we're going to teach it in sex education as a bare minimum as a starting point, and we might as well hit that really hard.

And I think it often is hit that, hey, you have to ask for consent. Like a lot of sex education has become like the pillar. It has all these gaping holes in it. Like, I think people's first thought is, well, what happens when someone changes their mind? Exactly. You know? Yeah. And even that hole in it is weaponized by, you know, people who want to shut down the conversation

entirely, right? Right. So, I mean, let's talk about that, first of all. Like, how does the idea of consent sort of limit the kinds of choices that we can make throughout a sexual encounter, you know? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And I really deeply agree with the way you set this up as a problem. I want to add into the conversation that that model of, oh, well, you have to ask for consent. makes it seem like the person doing the asking doesn't need to consent, right?

We don't think of the fact that both people need to be participating in this willingly and with agency. There's just this presumption that one person is sort of doing the asking and has no boundaries or no limits or no needs of their own. And then the question becomes, does the other person agree? So, I mean, part of the problem is that if you think about it for even a second, you want consensuality to be reciprocal, not just. One person is doing the consenting, the other person is doing the asking. I think it's really a problem that, again, we usually assume it's the man doing the asking, not that it has to be, but that's the public imagination. Yeah.

Men aren't thought of as having any needs to consent of their own or any of their own limits or boundaries. They're just supposed to be sort of on and ready for sex all the time. And then the trick is just to like get it out of the woman and hopefully get it out of the woman in a way that isn't rapy and doesn't, you know, transgress for boundaries. And that's kind of all that we're given. Yeah. And then in that model, it really is, it's so transactional. It's extremely transactional.

It's like saying, hey, can I bum a cigarette? Right. I take the cigarette, I smoke it, I get what I want out of it. And the other person, apart from handing it to me, has no responsibilities. Exactly. They have no other participation. So the consent doesn't, like what role, even if we're going to look at in this really cis, you know, male, female way?

What role does the woman have afterwards? Like, does she have a job to do of any kind? Does she have any responsibilities after that point? Right. Is it, how is the rest of this interaction supposed to work? Like, that is, I would have to think most people would agree. Like, that's not what sex is like. Sex is not actually, when you're having it, just a man taking something.

Right. I mean, not when it's good. I mean, that's the thing is, like you said, it'll avoid rape, I guess, but you'll, you know, avoid legal wrongdoing, but that just doesn't sound like good sex for either person, right? And so we've set up a model where the ideal encounter is this requesting permission, giving permission, which is almost sure to preclude good sex. It's actually quite depressing in the world of analytic philosophy that I'm usually in. philosophers who talk about consent generally talk about it. The model they have is that consent is a form of permission giving

where you release somebody from a duty not to do something to you. Okay. And if you think about it, their model is basically one person is saying, can I do the sex to you, going around trying to like get somebody to do, let them do the sex to them. The other person is like walking around, closed off, and then says, okay, you can do the sex to me. I mean, it's just like a setup for terrible sex. Well, and it frames sex as a violation as like, oh, we have a rule that we don't rape each other.

And to have sex is to say, okay, you can essentially rape me. Or you can steal from me, you can take something from me. Right. Like this thing that is normally not allowed, okay, it's allowed for you. Yeah, it's fundamentally sex negative. The fundamental idea is that sex. is default prohibited. And then as a favor,

every once in a while, somebody will unprohibit it for a bit. Another problem is... That's not how I want anybody who's having sex with me to feel about it. Exactly. You don't want them to do it as a favor. Right? Like you want them to...

I love your analogy because you want them to give you the cigarette as a favor. Yeah. That's great. And then you say, oh, thank you. You didn't need to give me that cigarette. That was nice of you. But, like, that's not how we want sex to be, quote, given to us. Yes.

Right? So I think even, you know, it's not just that it's a bare minimum, but it's sort of a really distorted version of a bare minimum. To me, the bare minimum is not that at all. The bare minimum is instead what I call consensuality rather than consent. Consensuality is like, as we're having sex, we are throughout communicating to one another, whether it's through body language or facial expression or gesture or words, that we both want to be doing this and that we're both alert to the fact that the other person is. telling us they want to be doing this, and that, you know, we're communicating to each other that we will stop if the other person no longer wants to be doing this. And that's like an ongoing tissue of communication. And none of that has much at all to do with like requesting sex as a favor out of somebody and then the other person possibly allowing it, which honestly may or may not happen, right? Like most good sex does not start with that request and permission kind of exchange at all. It doesn't mean you don't need consensuality, but you don't need that narrow exchange.

I think in the book, there's a lot of different analogies we could use here, but I think in the book you use the analogy of like two people like playing music together, where it's an activity that both people are going to participate in, or perhaps more people, are going to participate in simultaneously, communicatively, responding to each other. Okay, where we have the same tempo. I'm like making eye contact to make sure, okay, and the song is going to end now or whatever. And this is a way that humans know how to back. behavior that's also having a conversation. Dancing, obviously, very wonderful, partner dancing, where one person is leading, but the other person is allowing themselves to be led, or perhaps the different sort of dance, where there is no leader.

That-da-da. These are such clear metaphors that are really available to us just from our lives. Why do you think that we are not applying them in our conversations about sex? Yeah, that's a great question. The metaphor that everybody got all excited about instead, which I talk about in the book, and I think is, I see the point of it, but I think it's basically terrible is this giving somebody tea metaphor. Oh, right. It's like almost works. It almost works, but the idea is, I mean, it's kind of cute.

It's good for basic messages about consent. The guy who made the original video is like, well, you know, you don't pour tea down the throat of somebody who's unconscious or if somebody told you they wanted tea last week and they don't want tea this week. you don't force them to have it this week, and they're allowed to change their mind. They don't have to drink all of it. They can say yes, but just take a sip and that has to be okay with you. Exactly. And that's helpful. But like notice what's missing from that analogy, which is present in all of the analogies that you just gave, which is like, there's no discussion of what kind of tea.

They're not drinking the tea together. It's not a joint activity. Like once you pass over the tea, it's just like, you just drink the tea. You know, there's no discussion together about. how they're enjoying the tea or what they're liking about the tea or what kind of tea they want. Like, none of that is in the analogy. Whereas I think that the kinds of things you're talking about playing music together, dancing, I have an extended discussion about taking a walk together when you're traveling.

Right. Go into that. Go into that for me. Like taking a walk. How is sex like taking a walk together? I'm kind of obsessed with walking through cities, so it was a great analogy for me. It's my favorite thing to do. And the point I was trying to make is that, you know, when you go for a walk with somebody and it's a joint activity, it would be very weird for you to just say to somebody like, will you walk with me yes or no? And then if they say yes, then, you know, you walk in silence and for as long as you want until you're satisfied with the walk, with no negotiation over what kind of walk you're going to take, right? I mean, that's just not how we walk together. When we walk together, we do a little bit of negotiation.

in advance usually. We're like, oh, well, you know, it would be nice to take a walk. I have a couple of hours. We might say to each other, oh, I'd love to take a walk, but, you know, I actually hurt my ankle last week, so we're going to have to walk kind of slowly. So you do a little bit of advanced negotiation, usually. But then some of it is determined on the fly because you're checking in with one another and you're deciding as you go. You're like, oh, that coffee shop looks cute. Do you want to, hey, stop there? Yes or no. Are you ready for a break? Or importantly, you say things like, oh, this looked like it was going to be fun street to walk on, but actually it's really trafficking and boring, should we change paths. And then if somebody is able, you know, if somebody at some point says, you know what, I'm

starting to get tired, my feet are starting to hurt, let's call it. Yeah. Like nobody acts like that's this huge crisis, hopefully. You negotiate together when to end the walk and how to end the walk. And all of that communication that we're doing as we're walking, it's not rigid asking for permission and getting it. You know, it's not this old-fashioned model of how sex was supposed to be like, can I touch your breast yes or no, can I, you know.

It's not that kind of thing. You're just like building a joint activity together by chatting as you go. There's not just nonverbal communication. You're like, you're talking and just one of you like points left and you say, okay, we're going to take this left or sometimes it's verbal. Sometimes someone says, hey, can we cross the street at sunny? Exactly. Yeah.

Right. Sometimes it's verbal and sometimes it's verbal. and sometimes it's not verbal. And it's very weird to think, like, oh, but all of that talking takes away from the fun of the walk. Like, that's just how we build a nice walk together. And so it's not that I think you have to be, like, talking the whole way through sex. But I think the idea that there's something unsexy about communicating and negotiating as you go is very odd and comes out of this very weird idea that we have that communication should be minimal at a moment. at the most in order to avoid

illegality, like you said earlier, we have to have this consent exchange at the beginning. But then if all goes well, we're just supposed to sort of like magically have fun and not talk about it because that wouldn't be sexy. And I don't think that ever works, but the idea that it should work, I think, is grounded in the idea

that there's a pretty narrow way that sex is supposed to go. And we don't have to talk about it, it because there's a pretty well-worn idea of what sex looks like. And so what is there to talk about? And that's in itself depressing because, of course, the way that sex traditionally goes, it can be lovely, but it's grounded in a long history of heteronormativity and patriarchy and misogyny and so on.

So it's not necessarily the case that we want to just have the kind of sex that people always have. And if you're going to do anything other than that, you're going to have to communicate. You know, there was a time when I thought I was physically unable to get a good night's sleep. From whatever awful thing was happening in the news to whatever significantly less awful, but still annoying thing was happening in my personal life, I thought I was destined to wake up groggy and grumpy. But all that changed when I switched to the legend chill hybrid mattress from Lisa. Now I unwind, easier, sleep deeper, and wake up with more energy.

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Communication is the part of this, what's sexy about sex is, right? I mean, so much of the time it is. If it's good communication. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're giving me so much to think about here. You're also making me think about how the conversation about consent that we have had for the past decade or so leaves out so. it really reduces the way that someone can say they had a bad time.

Yes. You know, where, okay, if I consented at the beginning, then I really have nothing to complain about versus, to use your walk metaphor again, if someone says, oh, you know, this person asked me to go on a walk, and I said yes to the walk, but then as soon as we started walking, they grabbed my elbow and steered me around in silence, right?

And then I felt sort of, you know, manhandled, and I had to extricate myself. you know, basically I was treated poorly even though I consented at the beginning. Right. Or they walked so fast and I couldn't keep up and they never bothered to check if I was comfortable with the kids.

Yeah. And there's a gradation of like how bad can that experience be? Maybe it's so bad that it's criminal, right? Because you were kidnapped and taken on a walk or a sexual experience. Maybe it's bad enough that you might just tell a friend, oh man,

I hung out this person. They were kind of a jerk. And sometimes there might be something in between where it was like, yeah, I actually felt that I was treated kind of unethically or a way that I would really object to, but it's not necessarily a sex crime. Right, absolutely. It's just like, like, ah, it's maybe I would, I would warn other people away from interacting with this person. Like, those are all things that, you know, gradations of human behavior that we are familiar

with from other areas of life, you know, but that we have redemptive. down in terms of sex. Yeah, and the only tool that we've left ourselves, I mean, this is basically the same thing as you're saying, but the only tool that we've really left ourselves for calling out a bad sexual encounter is consent violation. And that's just often not what's an issue, you know?

Yeah, in the walking case, you might just think, I mean, there's all sorts of ways in which you might feel like you didn't really have agency during the walk. And probably none of those have to do with whether you actually agreed to go on the walk because like you said, you probably weren't kidnapped. But you might well feel like you don't have agency during the walk if, you know, the other person was deciding when to take breaks, the other person was deciding what route to take, the other person was setting the pace. And those things also might make the walk no fun. I mean, the two things I think we care about during

sex is does everybody involved have agency and is the event? I mean, I think there's sometimes there can be good sex that isn't necessarily pleasurable, which we can talk about if we want to, because sometimes you might experiment with something and that might be exciting and it might not be exactly your thing. So I don't want pleasure to be the criterion, but something like pleasure oriented, whether or not it ends up being pleasurable, right? So, you know, good sex is sex where everyone has agency, everyone is respecting that the other person has agency, and the activity is pleasure oriented. And that's the same with a way. luck. And there's all sorts of ways in which it could become not pleasurable or not pleasure-oriented or not an expression of your agency, whether or not you agreed to go on it, you know? And one of the things it needs in order to have those features is it needs to be genuinely collaborative. You know, so we need to reconceive of sex. I mean, this is obvious in a way, but it's just not the way we talk about. Sex is a collaborative activity. So we need to be collaborating. And that's just not captured in the consent part at all. Yeah. Yeah. When

you put it that way, very clearly isn't, because you consent to something that is being done to you, not in something that you participate in. And I want to move off of consent strictly, but I also just want to point out that, especially even in my world, comedy, I don't want to talk about any particular cases, but there's plenty of instances in which I've seen the concept of consent used by a weapon, used as a weapon by people saying, well, I asked for consent. Well, I asked for consent, and that's all you told me I had to do. And that's what I did. Like, well, no, maybe the person wasn't in a position where they could meaningfully give consent. Maybe there's something else going on.

Or there's cases where, you know, the public debate becomes only about, was this a consensual activity, this story that everybody heard, when there's honestly a lot more at issue. So, you said agency. Yeah. I think that sounds like a really important word. It's in the subtitle of the book. Yeah. Agency for everyone. So what is the difference between, you know, simply consent.

and having agency. What do you mean by agency? Yeah, I have a pretty rich notion of agency and I don't like to give it one of these abstract philosophy definitions because I think that it's a multifaceted notion. But basically when I'm talking about agency, I'm talking about roughly being the one who is in the driver's seat of what you're doing and your activity being self-expressed.

and self-determining. And that's very different from did you passively agree to it or not. And one thing I want to say right up front because it's really central to the book is that I have what philosophers call a non-ideal theory of agency, which is to say that I don't think that anyone ever has full and complete agency, that anyone is ever totally independently in the driver's seat of their own actions. we're always finite beings who are in all kinds of ways conditioned by and dependent on other people in our environment and so on. So for me, the goal is never full perfect agency.

The goal is enough agency that what you're doing is experienced by you as a gentle. And that's not a matter of perfection. And one of the things I care about a lot in the book is talking about what are the conditions that can support or scaffold or undermine our agency, given that that agency is never going to be perfect. So a lot of the book is, as you know, I do talk a lot about sexual negotiation and sexual communication, but I also talk a lot about how communication and negotiation

between the people involved is not enough for agency. There also have to be social conditions and material conditions in place that support and hold us in our imperfect agency. And the goal is not to, like I said, not to get perfect agency, but to get enough agency through that kind of support. I think all of that is very different from this kind of volunteeristic moment of getting to say yes or no, right? Which is just like, I mean, yeah, you want that to have agency also, but that's just like such a narrow slice compared to this richer ongoing notion that I'm talking about. So can you give us some examples of like what agency might look, especially imperfect agency, but that might be. be, you know, scaffolded in some ways, use your terms.

Yeah. Let me give you two examples that are very different kinds of examples, both of which I like. In the book, one of the things I talk about is having sex when you're a little bit tipsy or a little bit high, which is one of the more controversial parts of the book because, you know, we have this slogan in our heads that, oh, if somebody's drunk or high, then they can't consent. End of story, right? Which is, of course, absolutely unrealistic. I mean, most sex has had when people are a little drunk for hot.

Right. In America, most people are a little drunk after 6 p.m. every day. So that's what our last episode of this podcast is about, actually. Really? Yeah, we just did one about alcohol and American alcohol culture and the health effects, et cetera. I mean, it's an absolutely unrealistic standard. And there's actually some interesting qualitative social science research out there showing that there are some benefits to having a drink with the person before you have sex with them.

And it sort of allows for some kind of intimacy and bonding and listening. Anyway, it's a stupid standard. But once you acknowledge that it's a stupid standard, you don't want to go from that to saying, oh, so we just shouldn't care if somebody's drunk, right? Because it is true that if you're a little drunk and high, it is a bit of a compromise of your agency. It's always going to be a little bit of a compromise of your agency. So to get to the question you asked me, to me the question is not, are you so sober that you have perfect agency? The question is, well, how can we scaffold and support good quality agency in the context of the reduction of agency that comes with being a little bit high?

And how do we know when it's too much? So one of the things I say is, well, look, if you just say to somebody who's had a few drinks, do you want to have sex with me? and they say yes, and then you silently have sex with them, you may well wake up the next day and be like, crap, was that person really able to consent to that? How drunk were they? If, on the other hand, you are talking and chatting as you go and negotiating and having a real conversation

about what you like, what you don't like, how you feel, what your limits are, you've kind of already built in your answer, right? Because if the person is to, enough to be able to have that kind of subtle conversation, then we know that they are able to engage coherently with their desires and likes and dislikes. And you're not going to wake up the next day and be like, well, was that whole complicated, interesting conversation we had, just a fantastical production of drunkenness or highness. Right. So one of the ways that you can

scaffold people whose agency is a little bit compromised is by doing more work than usual, to sort of talk as you're going and just checking in with them about what state of mind they're in. Like, this is an answerable question. You can ask somebody who's a little bit drunk what state of mind they're in rather than just guessing the next day. Yeah. How are you feeling? Just left out of the conversation. Yeah.

And then a quite different example that's not about interpersonal communication that I want to introduce into this. is I make a lot of fuss in the book about how good quality agency always requires the ability to leave and to leave without the risk of having to deal with anger or violence, but also without the risk of having to deal with like trying to argue your way out of the encounter or negotiate the other person's feelings of disappointment or whatever. and a lot of whether you can leave, some of it is about communication, but a lot of it is about like actual material and financial infrastructure. So I argue that it's like a sexual justice issue,

whether or not there's good quality 24-hour public transportation in a city. Because literally the ability to get home. To just leave when you want and know that you can do that safely and without great expense and at your own time, it sounds like such a pragmatic thing, but that's a huge scaffolding of agency. You just literally have way more agency. Yeah. If you know that there's no huge transaction costs to you leaving when you want to,

rather than being trapped somewhere where you need a ride or whatever it may be. Yeah. And similarly, you know, when there's... This is part of why New York is such a horny city. Exactly. Is because people are like, well, yeah, I can go. Yeah, sure, I'll go over to your place. I can just, the subway runs all night.

Like, you get a couple blocks from the train. I'll get home. Maybe it'll take a little while. but like all I got to do is walk out the door and I'm on my way. I think that it's hard to overstate how important that is. Yeah. I mean, people don't think of that as an issue around sexual agency, but it really is. Yeah.

And, you know, financial independence is another example of that. I've made a lot of arguments for the value of public transportation on this show. I'm on record as being an advocate of a public, but this is a new, like, arrow in my quiver to say, public transportation will get you laid and make sex better for you, in fact. Sex better and more ethical, yeah. Yeah. Financial independence is another example of that kind of. Ride the D indeed.

That's for people in L.A. You know this? No. We have a new line called the D line and the L.A. Metro has put out shirts that say ride the D. Oh, of course. Which have become a local meme and people love these. So anyway. But it's a little bit more literally true than the people who designed the T-shirt probably thought.

I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I live in Berlin now. And the fact that, I mean, Berlin famously has this very elaborate sex culture. But the fact that you can get anywhere at any time of day instantly really supports that as a potentially ethical and pleasurable thing that supports agency. Yeah. So please go on.

Oh, my other example was just financial independence. You know, I think that if you have somebody who is very financially dependent on somebody else, no matter how nice the more powerful person is, no matter how much that person says, oh, I would never use our power imbalance against you. It doesn't matter how good their intentions are. And in a way, it doesn't even matter how good they are at communicating. You don't have the same kind of agency to set your boundaries or leave if you're financially dependent on somebody else. Yeah.

You know, so I think we scaffold our imperfect agency through all of these different means, through having community support, through being good at communication, but also through having the right kind of material infrastructure, through having the right kind of financial independence. One of the things I really want to do with the book is say, you know, we've talked about sexual ethics as if it all comes down to these one-on-one conversations and these very narrow ones, as we discussed. But actually, it's like a widespread social justice issue. We need to build a society that enables people to have genuine sexual agency and to be supported in that. You know, summer completely upends our routines and how we eat, doesn't it?

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Anybody could do it. I want to get to the barriers that we have to building a society like that or why we haven't built one. But let's talk about power imbalance because that's a whole section of the book. It's obviously a very hot topic regarding sex. And it's interesting because there's always going to be power and balances between people to some degree. There will always be some little amount. Someone might be like, you know, like three weeks older or make a little bit more money or whatever, right?

Or there's sometimes there's large power imbalances, right, that we're really concerned with. There's like professors and students or like bosses and people who work for them, right? And power and balances, people, first of all, fundamentally often find them to be hot to some degree. And also, they're simultaneously worrisome. And what I really like about your agency notion is

it helps clarify what the difference is between sort of a benign power imbalance or how we might make a power imbalance not harmful. Because like if the power imbalance is such that the person with less power also has less agency because they're constrained by they're like literally this, you know, that professor's student. Right. And like, okay, this person has power over me

and therefore I'm less able to say no or less able to leave. That's like the big concern, right? versus like a more notional, you know, someone has a, someone's a student and someone's a professor at a different university or something like that. Right, right, right. Like, it doesn't limit it quite that way. I don't want to get too into the weeds of like a really specific example, but does that make sense? It absolutely does. And I think we can say some interesting stuff about this without getting too into the weeds.

Please. So there's at least a couple of distinctions that I want to make here. So exactly as you said, I think the ideal of no power imbalance. is a hopeless ideal. And we shouldn't even hold it up as an ideal because it's not how human interactions work. So there's power imbalances, even from things like, you know,

there's the obvious ones that we talk about all the time, like financial imbalances or workplace imbalances or gender imbalances. But then there's just stuff like, is one person more extroverted than the other? You know, do they have a better community because they're more social than the other? Like you can't get rid of all of those power amounts.

So we have to figure out how to have ethical, pleasurable, agential sex in the context of the reality of power imbalances. Having said that, I do think that there are some power imbalances that are too big to overcome with good scaffolding or good communication. So one of the questions is, you know, okay, we all grant that there's a power imbalance always. We understand that what we do in the face of a power imbalance is we try to. scaffold the agency of the less powerful person, make sure the communication is better and so on. But we also have to be alert to when there's no compensating for how big the power imbalance is. It's just, you know, it's too big. So that's one issue.

The other issue is, and you sort of mentioned this very quickly along the way, sometimes we create power and balances on purpose because it's incredibly hot. Yeah. And I think any account of sexual agency that gives us the. result that dom-sub relationships or playful power imbalances are somehow intrinsically a problem is just automatically a bad theory of sexual agency. Because one of the main things that we want to do with our sexual agency is do that kind of play.

Most of us. It turns out it's a majority. When they do studies, the majority of people at least have fantasies about either subbing or doming or both, regardless of gender. So, you know, the fact that we call this a kink. is ridiculous. It's most of us. Yeah. So I just think that if your account of agency is of being in control,

and hence the whole idea of being submissive or having less power is automatically hit against your agency, then you've got a bad theory. You know, we've got to be able to understand how people express their agency through these sorts of power play. And in fact, I mean, it's not even specific to humans. You go to any dog park and you can walk. watch dogs enjoying dog subplay, right? You know, it's right there to be seen.

And we enjoy it outside of sex, too. So one of the examples I give in the book is, actually, I don't remember if I give it in the book or if I just say it a lot when I talk about the topic. I have a friend who is my clothing dom. In the rest of our relationship, we don't have a power imbalance, but we just have this dynamic

where she tells me what clothes I should buy and wear, and I'm like, okay. And it's delightful, you know? I mean, in some sense, it's erotic. Do you know what I mean? I don't mean it's like a sex thing, but it's playful and it's delightful, and I enjoy being clothing domed by her.

I wouldn't want to be domed by her or anyone else for my whole entire life, but, like, that's a pleasurable dynamic. The reason a lot of us hire personal trainers is because we, We want to be like exercise domed. Yeah. Right? It's not just because we think it's going to be more effective for getting fitter. It's also because we enjoy that dynamic to some extent.

So we have to be able to have an account that makes room for that kind of playful and intentionally chosen power imbalance. Yeah. And I don't think there's any simple answer about how to do that. But in the book, I try to explore the various ways in which we can make those kinds of power imbalances, be a gentle and playful, basically by making sure that we have, first of all, like, ways out of them if we no longer want that, right? Like, we need to be able to exit that power play. Otherwise, it's not playful anymore.

We need to engage in that kind of power play against a background where we're not already so disempowered that we can be sort of dragged into that dynamic, whether we want it or not, right? So there has to be some more background kinds of agency. And like we said, there's never exact equality, but like rough equality before that kind of place starts so that you're not entering into it from a position of no agency. There's all kinds of things we can do to scaffolding.

That's maybe, for instance, and by the way, when you say scaffolding, you're talking about, just to find that for me really quick. Yes, I should have done that a while ago. I'm sorry. No, it's fine. I think it makes sense intuitively. way you use it, but just, let's clarify. For me, scaffolding is the literal material or not so literal social infrastructure that we use to hold

up one another's agency as it were. You know, not to replace it, but to hold it in place. So the public transportation example that we were talking about earlier is to me a perfect example of scaffolding, right? It holds other people's agency in place. It enables them to have agency that they wouldn't otherwise have. And one of the nice things for me about the scaffolding metaphor is sometimes you need more of it, sometimes you need less of it.

Sometimes you need a different kind. If you think about when you're building a building, you need to scaffold different parts at different times. And it's not always the same amount. And also scaffolding can be bad. Actually, my editor really wanted me to get rid of the word scaffolding. We had a big fight about it. And it was one of the places where I said, no, I refuse to get rid of it. But her point was, she said to me, I'm from New York.

When people in New York hear the word scaffolding, they just think of ugly, useless stuff, stuff on buildings. Yeah. New York has a specific problem with scaffolding. Right. As covered hilariously by John Wilson is an incredible HBO series, by the way. That was an incredible episode of television. But yeah. But yeah.

But actually it was a really helpful point because I was like, yeah, well, there can be ugly, bad scaffolding that doesn't do anything. Like, we need good scaffolding, not just any of it. old scaffolding, right? Yeah. And so examples of that are you use in the book, for instance, when someone has a proper sex education. Right. Right. That's a form of scaffolding. Social support, them having a community that they can go to, right? That's maybe scaffolding they'd come in with. But then if I'm in a particular situation, okay, I want to make sure the person that I'm entering into a sexual encounter relationship with has agency. Right. That scaffolding might be us having a conversation

beforehand, having a safe word, that sort of thing. Yeah, or just, you know, giving the person, thinking in advance, to get back to the thing we were talking about earlier about ability to go home, you know, thinking in advance, hey, proposing going back to my place,

which is in the middle of nowhere out in the suburbs, is maybe not the best way to give this person agency over what happens. next, right? Maybe we should propose somewhere else. Right. So it's not just about the kind of conversations you have. It's also about setting up wind conditions. But in the context of the sort of power play and Dom sub stuff that we were starting to talk about, yeah, it can be establishing a safe word. It can be establishing in

advance that you're going to do some aftercare with the person and check in with each other after and make sure to restore what feels like an equal power dynamic once the How our play is over. There's lots of things we can do other than just sort of launch right into that kind of domination stuff. I'm curious about this idea of play that you brought up a couple times. And one thing that's really interesting is we've had on the show, another philosopher we had on the show is Teen Wynn,

who writes about games. Dear friend of mine, yeah. He's so wonderful. One of my favorite guests we've ever had. And he has an entire book, you know, games, agency is art. Agency is very important word to him. And that's also connected with the concept of play. Yeah.

And so these are two places where, like, games and sex are sort of, like, rhyming. Yeah. And so the question I have about play is that, you know, for instance, like power dynamics in sex, you want, I feel like sex is often game-like in that you want it to sort of be its own little separate, you know, world where we're going to have an interaction here that is not going to affect the rest of our lives, you know? Like, you want sort of, there's a power dynamic, but the power dynamic doesn't exist. in the real world. It just exists like it's sort of in the realm of dirty talk or in the realm of, you know, the agreement that we've made for this particular encounter. But, you know, there isn't actually a power imbalance to an enormous degree in real life.

At the same time, people are attracted to, I think, sexual relationships in which there is a real life power imbalance. Yes. You know, that is like part of the, I've just seen enough human behavior where people, you know, enter into this stuff. And so often the game is about the real life roles that people have. Does that make sense? It absolutely makes sense.

And so how do you keep those things linked yet separate? To me it seems like a real paradox of the way that sex play often operates, where you want to be a separate world, and yet it is connected to your real lives sort of indelibly. Yeah. I mean, that's a really deep question, honestly. It's funny because when you first said we wanted, to be separate and not leak into the rest of our lives, I immediately agreed with you because

I also think of it that way. But of course, there's a huge tradition of people who think exactly the opposite who think that, you know, if you have sex, then that means that now your life has to be, you know, committed to this person, headed towards reproduction, whatever. We can talk about how extreme that goes. But there's a lot of people for whom. the idea of casual sex or sex that doesn't immediately mean that now you're in some big relationship is unethical or a problem. That's a great point. So we're bringing our perspective to this, but it's not necessarily a shared perspective.

I, you know, in general, my orientation is towards being very permissive and thinking, you know, don't kink shame, almost anything can be made ethical as long as it's managed right. I also agree with you that a lot of people really want that power inequality, not just like when they're playing, but in life. Yeah. I, this is one place where my sort of permissive intuitions kind of maybe run out before other people's. I think that these sorts of lifelong 24-hour, really big power differentials, I think they're an ethical problem.

Yeah. That doesn't mean that that's the final word. Like, we're always balancing ethical imperfections, you know. I don't think that just because something is ethically suspect, that means that we have to have an absolute prohibition against it. But there is a point at which I think if that power inequality and that power dynamic is permanent and ongoing and it has no outside and it has no exit conditions, there's some ethical worries there that aren't going to go. go away from me. Yeah. You know?

I agree. I agree with that. Yeah. So I don't know that there is a solution to the problem you're asking is what I'm saying. I think maybe at a certain point we've got to say, yeah, you know, that's kind of ethically problematic. And maybe it's what they want anyway and I don't think it should be against the law.

But, yeah. I mean, there are people who enter into very like, you know, well-contracted, sort of like permanent, dub, like lifestyle relationships. And that's a whole, you know. know. Yeah. But the thing is, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to talk over you. No, not at all. Yeah, so that's another issue is these sorts of like official master slave things. I have ethical problems with those too, but I got to say, I think that what's even more ethically suspect than those is the unspoken, unofficial vanilla version that you get in very

gender traditional couple a lot of the time. They're doing the same thing. They just haven't negotiated it. And that's even more problematic to me. Or it is a life. style, you know, hey, the man is in charge. Right. I mean, this is a thing that people pick. Yeah. And I think the thing that gives me an ukeiness about that is that, yeah, the person has no exit. Right.

That's the worry. Yeah. And it's not a consent problem. Yeah. People try to make it a consent problem. They're like, oh, we live in such a sexist society that the woman can't actually consent to this because she's so disempowered. I think that that's actually very patronizing.

Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, women can consent to all kinds of un-exemptive. equal sexist relationships. So trying to reduce it to a consent problem doesn't work for me. But it's still an ethical problem. Yeah. So I think there's so many different ways to break this down. The thing I'm really taking away from it is it's so important to preserve in any kind of power imbalance to preserve the person with less powers agency and for both people to sort of make sure, hey, if you want to get out of this, if you want to stop it, if you want to, you know, that there's some outside to it that can be gotten to.

Yeah. And that connects to both, hey, we're in a particular, you know, kinky play environment and there's a safe word and you can just sort of pull the rip cord and get out of it. Or, for instance, this is why you might want to have divorce rights. Right. So you could leave a marriage and not be permanently stuck in a subordinate. social position for your entire life, right? Exactly. And it's also why you want, and this gets, you know, you said earlier,

maybe we can talk about, like, what does a society need to do to support this? It's also why we need a society where nobody's at risk of being completely financially stranded, right? Where there's, like, a basic safety network so that people can leave. It's also why we need a society that offers people both formal and informal, safe places to leave to. And it's also why we need a society. This is actually related to the talk I was giving last night.

It was a very different talk. But it's also why we need a society that doesn't feed people the story that somehow it's good to stay in a relationship if you possibly can no matter what. Right? Like you've failed at the relationship if you leave or that it's somehow virtuous to stay. We need to create cultural norms. and social scripts and stories that normalize people leaving if it's not good for them, rather than the idea we have now that you get some sort of like points from the universe

for being virtuous if you manage to make a relationship last until death. Because that just, you know, that gives people the message that they have somehow failed or they're doing something wrong if they recognize that they need out. So it's multi-layered. It's about how we communicate. It's about what society provides to people. It's about what your little local friend group and community provides to you and tells you is okay or not okay. All of these things collude, I think, to make it possible for people to have agency or not across these sorts of power balances.

Yeah. I mean, the thing about points from the universe if you make a relationship last is that hits on. some stuff that I talk about honestly in the special that I have coming out on this channel in a couple months that sort of feeling of oh I have failed is such a deeply pervasive part

of our relationship scripts let's talk a little bit about social scripts for relationships and sex because that is something that you cover what relations does that how do you write about them? About social scripts? Yeah I mean I think that

One of the things that I wanted to do in the book, and I hope I did in the book, is I think that there's already more, this is an indirect answer to your question, but I will talk about social scripts in a moment. I think there's already more wisdom about how to support sexual agency and negotiate sex well out there than we've tapped into because there are all these communities that have not been able to use the application. mainstream, standardized scripts that are handed to us. And so have had to do actual work to broaden the scripts and think critically about what the scripts could or should be. And I'm thinking here about queer communities, kinky communities, poly communities, but also just people who have been excluded from mainstream sexual narratives because they're treated as desexualized and off limits. So like disabled people, older people, trans people, all these people who for one reason or another are shut out of our mainstream imagination of who gets to count as like even having sex in the first place, right? All of those people have built a lot of wisdom, but that wisdom hasn't made it into the mainstream and it certainly hasn't made it into academic writing about sex.

So I was trying to tap into a lot of that wisdom, which is to say, I think, The problem is we have these very well-worn, stereotyped social scripts about how sex is supposed to go, how romance is supposed to go. Those are, I mean, one problem with those scripts is that they are just very narrow and don't give us a lot of possibilities. But the other problem with those scripts is that they have been embedded from the beginning into sort of toxic. patriarchal norms and they're bad scripts, right? One of the main features of our standardized script is that, and this goes back to what we're talking about at the beginning, is that the man is the pursuer and the woman is the pursued. And that's supposed to be good, right?

Like, it's supposed to be super romantic for men to just like, if she says, no, you just keep trying and trying. And we have all these movies of, you know, John Cusack holding the stupid boombox under the woman's window. And that's obviously one of the better portrayals of that dynamic. Exactly. That's actually a pretty good movie. But like this is so entrenched that the man, what's, what's romantic and appropriate is the man pursues and pursues until he gets the ass, hopefully a consensual one, right? But that's where that line starts to get blurry through, you know, because it's a bad script and so it's a little rape you to start with. But yeah, and the woman is pursued and tries to say no and hold on to like

her whatever, her sexual virgin, whatever. And then the really hot thing is when the man manages to pursue the woman and, like, gets consent and then they just fall in and have, like, totally standard sex. Whatever. That script is both overly entrenched, so it's hard for people to imagine anything else. And it's a pretty toxic script. And I think it's bad, not just for women, which we've focused on a lot in our society. I think it's at least as bad for men. Yeah.

Because it sets men up to have to think of themselves as predatory. and as desperate for sex and as not having the right to say no to sex, but also as not being inherently desirable and needing to win sex through this big quest. So that script sucks. And we need both more scripts and better scripts, but we also need more social freedom to be creative about our scripts and invent new ones.

But the point I was trying to make is a lot of that is already happening. It's just that it's happening in place. that are still a little bit in the shadows and haven't been drawn on in the mainstream in the same way. You're hitting on so much that means a lot to me. And again, in my new hour of stand-up, like I talk about this specifically that, you know, men are told to be pursuers, to be chasers, to have to perform in a certain way in order to, you know, win love. Yeah, win sex or love, right? And like, so, and, you know, I think women have, because of, you know, patriarchy and everything else, have developed more of a habit of questioning these scripts, right?

And men have less so. And what I finally started to realize is, like, that story of being the pursuer is, like, fundamentally a story of, like, my own unworthiness. Exactly. Of, like, I'm undesirable. I'm disgusting. I have to go do something special. I'm Pepe Lepewue chasing the cat, right?

Like, and that was always, you know, that cartoon's been criticized my entire life, right? Like, oh, this is a cartoon about rape culture or whatever, right? But like, isn't it horrible to be that cat? And like, yes, but also it's bad to be portrayed as a skunk. Like, he's disgusting. Right, you stink and he gets. Yeah, and that's what you're told you are. You're a disgusting creature.

that has to chase, right? And I think that that core belief, I think so many men grow up with this belief that, like, they are valueless. And they have to appear confident. They have to appear assertive. They have to, like, do all the right things. They have to pay for everything.

They have to put on this elaborate performance. But deep down, what does that mean? It means they're dirt. It means they're not worthy of love. Exactly. And that creates such a deep, insecurity in people, right? And that insecurity is why, so like, I'm going off on a little bit of a rant here, but... No, I really appreciate it. I think that, like, one of the, when I think about, like, mistakes that men often make on a date or mistakes that I've made, it's like putting too much pressure on the encounter, right?

This has to go well. Yeah. This has to go. If you don't like me, I'm going to, I'm going to be so upset. I'm going to, like, be devastated. I'm going to kill myself, right? Even if it's not, I'm going to kill myself, right? Even if it's not, I'm going to kill myself. Right? Even if it's not, I'm going to kill myself, it's, it's, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be upset, right? That puts the woman in a heterore relationship in the position of, oh, God, if I say, no, he's going to take it so hard. Exactly. You know, oh, it's going to be so bad. And when it goes well, it's when I'm, if I'm on a date, I'm going like, hey, you know, whatever happens tonight, I'm going to be fine because I know I'm pretty great. And if for some reason, we're not a match, no big deal, right? Because someone else, I'll go on another day tomorrow and that one might be better, right? Or, or whatever. That's like real confidence, right? But if you believe that you are inherently valueless,

then like the love or the acquiescence or the consent to sex becomes a judgment on your self-worth. And that's too much pressure to put on the situation. I think that's so well said. And I really just don't think we talk about it nearly enough. I don't think we talk about how the traditional structure of patriarchy sucks for men. And this is not taking anything away from, this isn't some like manosphere point. I'm not taking away from how much it sucks for women, but we just don't, we're not honest or clearheaded about how much it sucks for men. And I think a lot about what we do to young boys when we raise them to think of themselves as fundamentally undesirable, as fundamentally in the predator position, and as fundamentally needing to, you know, as you

often hear in mainstream discussions, like to bring something to the table. before they've earned sex, like bring, what is it going to be? Is it money? Is it security? What is it? But they're supposed to like trade something other than their intrinsic desirability for sex, which also commodifies sex in this creepy way. And we could talk about that too.

But I think it's deeply damaging. And I'm kind of shocked at how normalized it is. I'm shocked at how we think that it is funny and fine to joke about how men are disgusting and we don't want to see their bodies. and they're scary and, like, ew, gross, we can see their ass. Like, it's so normalized. And, of course, men say... In progressive communities as well.

Exactly. It's totally endemic. Absolutely. In every community, of course, men also say horrible things about women's bodies. Yeah. But even the men who don't do that know that they're being mean, right? They all, I mean, you know, yes, there's gross sexist communities where doing that is normalized, but they know they're being mean.

Whereas I think we don't even think of it as mean to insult men's bodies and insult their desirability. We just think that that's like how you talk about men. Yeah. You know, they're disgusting, they're gross. It's so damaging. There's a wonderful essay that, this would be a better plug if I could remember the name of the essay. But there's a wonderful essay that I cite a bunch in the book by a trans guy who talks about

the actual experience of going from not experience. his own body as feared and predatory to experiencing it that way. And having that kind of perspective from somebody who wasn't raised with it from the beginning and who can sort of see it for what it is for that reason is, I think, really powerful. You also have been acted by a trans woman who I think wrote about the reverse. The reverse experience. Right. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is an interesting thing that we can, a real value that trans people, who transitioned in adulthood can bring to the table in terms of our understanding of these dynamics is, you know, when your position within the dynamics switches, it can give you more of a perspective on what's going on than if it's just the water you've swum in since you became conscious to begin with. Yeah. I think part of why I, you know, enjoy, like, you know, being a, knowing queer people being a part of queer communities or having these conversations is because, you know, queer folks

are the ones who have thought about this more or had to write new scripts. Right, because they have to. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I also think that there's an interesting space in, like, kink to explore this stuff. Because it's so, you know, the thing that first got me thinking about this

was the YouTube philosopher ContraPoints, you familiar with her? She's a wonderful... I interviewed her on this show about her. Twilight video essay. Yeah. But she talks about like, you know, even in kink, there's this like presumption of, you know, the male is the dom and the woman is the sub. And like a lot of people want that and great, you know.

But if you can allow yourself to experience the opposite, if you can allow yourself as the man to be chased if the woman can be allowed to be the predator, right, in a hetero context, that, like, that can really, like, open up a new, like, way of thinking about yourself, you know? Yeah, right. And a new way of thinking about human relations. that is, it subverts the idea that like men are valueless and need to like exert violence or extract what they want.

And often like, it's really funny to distill it down to this, but often like when when I look at men who are really deep in this way of thinking, either men who are really aggressive or like in-cell type men who are like believe in their own valueless, a valueless, I'm like, I want to ask, what would it mean to you to believe that like you're worthy of love as you are? Yeah. Or that someone might want to fuck you just as the person on the body that you are right now. Like, what if you could believe that about yourself? Because I think it's literally true.

And it's so self-perpetuating. Yeah. The men who think of that as impossible for themselves are the men who make themselves unfuckable and unappealing. Right. I mean, which makes sense. I mean, it's so obvious when you think it's a vicious circle. I mean, I think it's so sad because we've spent decades, you know, ever since Second Wave feminism,

we've spent decades critiquing the fact that society pushes women to modify their bodies and change their self-presentation and pour all of these, you know, products that capitalism generates into themselves in order to make themselves. appealing to men. That's an old critique. But instead of undoing that, what we did was we extended it to men too. So now men also feel like they need to modify themselves and do all these things to themselves to be appealing to women. We sort of went, and we went towards equality in exactly the wrong direction. And of course, you know, the masculine coded version of it looks a little bit

different from the woman coded version of it. So you have all of these, you know, talk Influencers, like the looks maxers and so on, saying, oh, you know, we can make this a numerical science. We have to, like, modify our bodies to exactly these numerical proportions. Otherwise, we are undesirable and we'll never, like, get the high value women. I mean, it's also creepily commodified, right? All this talk about high value people and low value people. And it's just, it's creepy down to the core in terms of the way it borrows on these

economic models of sex as something that is this like valuable entity that men are trying to extract from women and women are trying to keep it. Right. It's terrible. But I mean, it has this very masculine feel, this idea that we can make this all about numbers. Mm-hmm. But it's really the same thing that women have been doing for decades.

Yeah. And I think it's really sad that the direction we've gone. on is in terms of making more people feel like they're intrinsically undesirable and need to modify themselves to be desirable rather than fewer. Right. Yeah. And when a man sort of is, you know, is sort of celebrating himself, right, or his appearance, or the appearance of another man, or even in the sort of more look maxer community,

often the thing that's used to take them down a peg is, oh, that's homoerotic, right? Or that's gay in some way as a negative, which is also really fascinating to me. It is fascinating. The role of homeroticism and all of this is really complicated and fascinating. Because there are corners of like the male insult community now where they think that like having sex with women is gay. Like that's, you're not supposed to. It's very confusing. Yeah.

It's very confusing. Actually, since you raised the topic of the homerotic stuff, there's a point that I want to add in here, which is, you know, there have been these critiques for decades, these sort of homophobic critiques of gay male culture saying, oh, you know, gay men, all they want to do is have sex all the time. They're just like constantly having sex and they don't have any boundaries. And, I mean, part of me wants to say, like, it's fine if people want to have sex all the time. and most of this is just homophobia, but also there is an element of truth in it. And like those gay men in those communities, they were raised as boys just like all men.

Where would they have learned any message other than you're supposed to want to have sex all the time and you don't get to have boundaries? Yeah. Right? That's actually the same message that heteroman have. It's just that heteroman are trying to have sex with women who've been trained up on the idea that they will set boundaries and they're not supposed to want sex as much and they're the ones who are imposing the limits.

But of course if you get a bunch of people, all of whom were raised to think that they're not supposed to have limits and they're not supposed to have boundaries and they're supposed to have sex whenever they can get it and extract it whenever they can, then of course they're going to have that culture. So I think it harms all men. It doesn't just harm heterosexual men. it's no surprise that that same sort of harmful narrative about desirability and boundaries and so on and predatoryness is just as live in the gay men's communities as it is in straight men's communities. Yeah, the presumption that men want to have sex all the time is so pervasive. And I find that in my own sex life, the time that I feel most sort of like ashamed and confused is when I'm in a situation and I think, feel that I can't perform, I can't live up to the expectation that I should want to have sex right now. I'm like, what's going on? What's happening? And that's when there's most of a screeching halt and

we have trouble communicating, et cetera. And then it'll often be like much later, I'm like, oh, I think I just like didn't, I think I just wasn't into that experience. I think I just didn't or I wasn't or I wasn't orney that day or something about it wasn't turning me out or I didn't, or, you know, I wasn't attracted to the situation or the person and I feel ashamed for that. you know, and I feel like I'm like letting down the universe in some way. And that is like such a hard thing to unpack. And I think a lot of men don't even have a, have the, even the internal language in their minds to like acknowledge the facts that they might

occasionally not want to have sex. Or not have that kind of sex. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's so normal. I mean, this is why it was so easy to turn Viagra into one of the best. selling drugs of all time, right? It was really, really easy for Pfizer to market the line that, you know, any physical lack

of interest in sex at any time, at any moment is not just a problem, but literally a medical pathology. Yeah. Right? Like there is something literally wrong with you if you cannot, as it were, rise to the occasion no matter what. It was extremely easy to sell men on that. that line, right? And it basically pathologized, like literally pathologized, almost all men,

because almost, you know, unless you're a certain kind of 18-year-old boy, all men have moments where that's just not the mood they're in. And that we have literally framed that as a disease, right, as a problem that needs to be medically fixed. Yeah. Whereas women, for better and for worse, have been raised on the idea that, you know, the default is that they're not into it. and they need to be like wooed into it or, you know, seduced into it or given something in return. It's a very different mindset. Yeah. I mean, look, actual erectile dysfunction is real, especially.

I'm getting older. And, you know, there's times where you're like, hey, come on. Yeah. Come on. What's going on here? Your body starts changing. But also, like, yeah, I don't think we've been trained or have any language to recognize the fact, hey, sometimes you actually just might not be turned down by a situation. Exactly.

Or by a person. Yeah. I don't want to come off as anti-viagra by any means. I think there are plenty of words. But it obscures the fact that, you know, that sometimes you could not be into it tonight. Right. And so let's talk a little bit about the barrier to acknowledging this, you know, these scripts that we have. Because, so when I think about, what do we call toxic masculinity, narrow masculinity, patriarchy, things like that.

often it's really hard to have a conversation about how it affects men. Yes. A lot of times I'll have this conversation with women and they'll be like, I don't want to hear it. And I'm sort of like, I understand why you might not want to hear it. Like, we don't have to talk about it. It's okay. But I think it's because, like, you know, men have been on top for so long and have set so much of the constraints and rules of society, right? that, okay, here's the way that I put it,

is that men are the greater perpetrators of this stuff in terms of creating the cultural conditions and are also victims. Women are the greater victims, but we're both perpetrators and victims, you know? And we have to acknowledge that, you know, everybody both creates these social ideas and creates these scripts collaboratively.

We're all doing it to differing degrees and everybody suffers from it. And until we can accept that and, like, actually have a conversation, about it and basically, you know, raise men's consciousness as well to how this shit hurts them. Right. We're not going to be able to address any of it.

I totally agree, and I would just add to that, that there's a sense in which individual men and individual women, even if, even given that it's obviously true, that gender inequality still exists and that, you know, sort of on the whole, men have more power than women. men do. Individuals are not the main ones who are perpetrating this stuff anyway, right? I mean, it's getting recreated and re-entrenched at the level of institutions, at the level of ideology, at the level of systems. And so I don't even really hold men, individual men, that responsible for perpetrating

patriarchy. I mean, some of them, of course. But as a whole, I just think most of this gets perpetrated, not by individual. at all. But by the way, we build our institutions and the way ideologies get passed down and entrenched in society and so on. So there's really only, you know, the fact that men are more powerful does not make them, it's not like there's some boardroom somewhere where they're like, let's keep doing this patriarchy thing. This is cool. Yeah. I mean, it's just society reproduces itself and reproduces its institutions and reproduces its norms and its ideologies.

And so I do think that we're all victims of it, even though, yes, of course, in some obvious senses, men have more power. And maybe in some very high-level, broad historical sense, they're more the ones who created it. But that's like at such a high level of abstraction that it's not that useful. Do you know what I mean? I think in everyday life, most of us are not going around making choices about whether to recreate these things. They're just recreating themselves. But we can have more awareness of when we're following like a harmful script, right? Absolutely.

And you have some funny examples of like internet memes about, you know, women talking about men being inherently disgusting or inherently violent or the combination of the two. That like, again, in largely like progressive or like pro-feminist spaces that like re-entrench this stuff, right? Yeah. And I've had the same experience as you. I've often had women in particular just not want to have this conversation and be very uncovering. with a conversation about the way this hurts men, because it's very easy for it to start sounding like this creepy

manosphere, like, oh, men are the real victims here. Yeah. You know, which they are. They're just not the only real victims, you know. But it is hard to have that conversation without sounding like you're aligning yourself with that discourse. Well, in the manisphere discourse is like often identifies a problem, but holds onto the overall script, right?

And says, oh, the problem is. is I'm being prevented from, you know, acquiring the sex that I want in the extractive way. No, no, the problem is the extractive model is yada, yada, yeah, yeah, right? That's such an insightful way of putting it because in anti-oppressive political theory, there's a really important distinction between people who are dissatisfied with the system because they want to have a higher position within the hierarchy that exists within the system. Right. Versus people who are dissatisfied with the system because they think that the system.

is bad. Right. And you're exactly right. I hadn't thought of it in exactly those terms, but I think you're exactly right. Like the Manosphere version is it's so unfair that I'm in a lower place in the hierarchy and what can I do personally to get a higher place in the hierarchy. And that's really different from the kind of critique I'm interested in, which I think often does come out of queer communities and so on, which is like we need to be questioning

how we set up these hierarchies and systems and scripts to begin with. Yeah. Absolutely. And like what I want men to realize is like the hierarchy is in fact hurting you. Absolutely. Even if you are temporarily on the top of it, you know, it's almost a little bit like the wealth hierarchy where like in America, even if you're rich, you're constantly made to feel insecure. And so, you know, rich people are often very unhappy because they're working themselves like crazy and they're acquiring more things. And they're like on this treadmill, I think the gender hierarchy is like the same way.

It feeds off of, it feeds off of. it feeds off of male insecurity, right, even when men are at the top. Absolutely. So let's, we've been talking for, I could talk to you for a thousand years. And I hope to more in the future. But you talk a lot in the book about, you know, correctives that we could take to all these problems, right? You say a couple times in the book, you know, we should have sex education that X, Y, Z. when, you know, men are growing up, we should tell them, you know, ABC.

Right. And those are wonderful prescriptions. But one of the questions I have when I'm reading them is, why is it so hard for us to do that when it comes to sex? You know, like sex seems to be a uniquely difficult sphere for us to have a real conversation about societally and to really train each other. And even you as a philosopher, you know, in the field of, I guess I would call this book in with ethics and sex, right? Broadly, yeah. I could imagine, for instance, like, medical ethics, for instance, is, like, a very well-established

field that I think was probably not as hard to talk about, like, in a clinical or, like, educational context. Sex education in America barely exists. Yeah. And so, like, you know, when you're saying, hey, we should have sex education that broadens the notion of consent in all these ways, well, hey, we're not even doing wear a condom in like the majority of states in America. Right.

So why do you think that is? Yeah, and I would just say, I mean, you know, the situation in the United States is perhaps especially dire, but even in very progressive countries, I don't know of any country that actually educates, like, teenagers in a way that emphasizes building genuine, rich sexual agency and valuing sexual pleasure. Like that is not, that is a bar where nowhere near anywhere as far as I know.

I, yeah, we are, we are, there's such a huge distance between the kind of sex education I'm imagining and what exists if it exists at all. My vision would be, and this is by way of getting to your question, my vision would be we have to completely reorganize what we think we're doing with sex education. And we need to think of educating, the ethical and moral and social education of children and young people should be first and foremost helping them develop into agency. And that means both their own agency, but also learning how to understand and respect other people's agency. That would reorganize every, we do the opposite. We raise kids for compliance and for molding them to be what we think they should be. I'm not even talking about sex yet, right? Just in general, our whole way of raising and educating kids is geared towards making them compliant

and disciplining them into certain sorts of success markers. And we've come nowhere near the idea that the job of social and ethical education is to raise people into agency. As to why it's, so I think we're sort of disastrously bad at this, not just in the domain of sex, but just I think we're failing young people in terms of how we raise and educate them, broadly speaking. Why is it so hard to do it in the domain of sex?

There's a really interesting debate in the philosophy of sex literature over what's called sex exceptionalism. People who believe in sex exceptionalism think that sex is so fundamentally different from other human activities, that it really needs its own ethics and its own philosophical story. And then people who deny sex exceptionalism want to say, well, no, sex is just like one more thing that we do. It's like going on a walk. Yes. I'm very far on the not sex exceptionalist.

Yeah, I intuited this. And, you know, part of what I enjoy doing in this book is talking about sex by talking about lots of other things. Right? And showing how, yeah, so we talked about the walk case. I have lots of examples all the way through that have nothing to do with sex. Because for me, sex is sex is just what matters to me about it is sex is something that we do as a joint collaborative activity when it's going well. And it's one that involves intimacy and vulnerability. Right. So it's not like, you know, there's other things we collaborate on that are much more abstract. But it's the kind of collaborative activity that involves the potential for vulnerability and involves intimacies of the body. But in that way, it's no different from walking or giving medical care or dancing or sparring in a ring if you do martial arts. All of these are things like that. I don't see sex as special. But there's a reason why there are sex exceptionalists, and that is that our whole society for thousands of years has generated and maintained this myth of sex exceptionalism.

So I don't think ultimately it's deeply different from any of these other human activities. But my goodness, are we trained from day one to think that it is, right? To think that sex is a, A, shameful, B, like more of a measure of your self-worth than almost anything else. See a domain of intense vulnerability where like if it goes wrong, you don't just feel like, oh, well, that kind of sucked. You're, you know, often deeply traumatized. I think that that is socially produced. I don't think it's intrinsic to sex. But the reality is that now, because of all of this, you know, thousands of years of history and society, people really do have almost uniquely heightened vulnerable reactions to the topic, right? I mean, if your walk turns out to be

unpleasant, you're most likely to just feel like, oh, that day was kind of a bummer, but you're unlikely to need years of therapy, right? But if sex goes wrong, people can be fundamentally traumatized. And one theory is that that's because sex is some, like, deeply different thing, but I just think it's because we've trained people up to put so much stock in it. And that makes it almost impossible to talk about it. Well, can I add to that, that sexual violence is, in fact, like endemic. Like in certain, the number of people, even just, you know, sexual abuse within families, right, is just so routine, so routine as like a, it's as, it's as common as littering almost,

you know, in terms of just the carelessness with people treat each other or the casual maliciousness or the selfishness. And so many people, their first encounter with sex is, is it, is it, her. harming them. Right. You know, so many people who I've been close with have had that experience. And I think that makes it really hard to have a clear conversation about it. Yeah.

So, I mean, there's this deep social contradiction or tension, right? Where on the one hand, it's the thing that we feel that we've been trained to feel most raw about and most vulnerable about. And it's all bound up with shame and all the stuff that makes it magically different from anything else and magically more damaging if it goes wrong. And then at the same time, as you're pointing out, we have normalized sexual harm. So that's a really bad mix. Yeah. Because I think it means that a huge number of people are walking around pretty traumatized.

Yeah. And so then, of course, it's hard to build a frank and high-quality set of conversations or sexual education curriculum. I've often had people when I give talks about this, comments. on how they're sort of blown away that I can talk about these issues in such a matter-of-fact way. And it is kind of remarkable

that no matter which direction you're coming from politically and no matter who you are, most people have a hard time just talking about these things straightforwardly. Yeah. You know? So sex exceptionalism is true

to the extent that we've sort of, through a self-fulfilling prophecy, made it true. And that makes it really hard to address these issues. I've had, I've done a lot of events around the book, which have attracted a lot of sex educators, which I'm thrilled about.

It's wonderful. And oftentimes they come up to me afterwards, and they're like, well, this is really inspiring, but I have no idea how to implement it because we're so far back, you know, so many steps behind this. And I don't feel like I can give my students any message other than no means no and yes means yes

because otherwise they're just going to go around violating each other, you know? And they're like, how do I even start to give them anything else when they need this really basic message? And I don't really quite know how to answer that question because what I really think is that we need to have been starting to train kids on how to communicate and collaborate and understand their own boundaries and other people's boundaries and how to value pleasure. I don't mean sexual pleasure, just pleasure and value their own self-expressive agency. We have to have started that way before sex is even.

on the table, right? We have to have started that with little kids. And given that we don't, it is hard to know how to intervene when people are already not trained up on that. Yeah. You know? I mean, little tiny kids learn that they have no right to decide what they eat, when they eat it, who to be friends with, when to go to bed, when to wake up. Yeah. Which lessons to take whatever. Like we do not train people to think of themselves. as entitled to agency. We don't train them with any skills at agency. We don't train them to have any skills at collaboratively recognizing and respecting anybody else's agency.

So then by the time we get to the point where it's time to start educating them about sex, we've laid a terrible groundwork. Yeah. And I don't really have a great pithy answer for how to fix them. Yeah, I'm not expecting me to. And it makes me realize how long we've been grappling with these issues. You know, I think about just, you know, the educational material I was given as a small kid. And, you know, I grew up in the 80s and there was a, I think a lot of residual sort of like hippie culture around. And I remember like, there was like an album called Free to Be You.

Do you remember this? Very much so, yeah. And there's a lot of that sort of culture, right? Like pre-Sessimmee Street kind of stuff. And I remember a song, I don't remember it was that or something else, but it was like, you know, it went like my body. Nobody's nobody's body but mine. You run your own body, let me run mine. And I just stuck with me.

It's something I heard when I was probably five years old. And now I'm like, oh, that was some hippie shit. Right. That was like some very evolved educators somewhere was trying to insert some stuff. And they got it into PBS in the late 70s, you know? And then it sort of dissipated. And, you know, this sort of battle is one that we've been fighting for generations to just have the most basic conversation about like literal, just,

physical autonomy, trying to tell kids, hey, you can have a boundary that starts at your own skin. Right, right. Right. And yeah, and I mean, this is another better way of putting a point I made earlier. The best we can hope for, I think, out of our sex education system at this point, the best we can hope for is like good harm reduction, right? Like trying to stave off harm, stave off sexual violence and assault, stave off unwanted pregnancies, stave off STI's. But going beyond harm reduction to some sort of positive, like helping people build a toolbox to actually have good sex or discover what they might enjoy or recognize that different bodies want different things, we're nowhere near that. We're nowhere near any kind of positive picture. On a societal level. But something that I have, you know, been happy to discover as an adult is that like good, healthy sex doesn't.

exists. Oh, for sure. Yeah. One can have it. Right. Right. There are ways to do it. It's not something that, it's not a situation that you always have to be frightened

of. No. And you can do things to have good collaborative sex with a partner or with multiple partners, if you prefer. And that this is like a real thing that's available to people. Yeah. And I do think what I love about your book, and I'm trying to bring us slowly into a landing here, what I love about your book is that, like, you are not too much

grappling with a gigantic. you know, philosophical or societal issues. No, right. You're also, the book is very clear on, like, here are things that you can do to make sure that you and your partner have agency to make sure that you're having, that you're having good sex, right?

Yeah, and not just ethical sex, not just like has past the ethical bar, but, like, actually good. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, let me be clear. When I said we're, all we were doing is harm reduction, I literally meant, like, in the classroom with teenagers.

Yes, got it. Like, that's the most we can hope for and we don't even usually get that. Yeah. Right. But yeah, I really want to pound home the message you just gave that. Pound it home. Pound it home.

Really behind everything that we've talked about, the biggest thing that I wanted to do in writing this book was this. Like, I felt like everything I was reading from both the right and the left from feminists, from everybody on sex, was fundamentally negative. It was fundamentally about either harm reduction or about how terrible. terrible sex is because of patriarchy or how terrible, whatever, you know, how violent men are, how much rape there is. And these are all very important facts. And I'm glad that that literature exists. But like you said, you know, despite all of these opportunities for harm, most of the time, sex is super fun. And most of the time, like, we're enjoying it. And it's great. Like, we, there is tons of good sex happening, as you said. And for all of the harms that are out there and

all of the ways in which it's messed up. Basically, sex is this, like, great thing that we do that adds to our flourishing. And there's been almost no careful critical thought or discussion about the joyousness or the pleasure of it or how to, you know, grab onto and understand and amplify that pleasure. And I wanted to write a book, you know, along the way I do talk about sexual harm because it's impossible to talk about the good without. the bad. But I really wanted to write a book that was focused on the positive rather than the negative for once and that was about sexual joy and empowerment and pleasure. And like you said, the fact that it already exists. And what we want to do is understand when and how and why it exists and like do more of that. Yeah. You know, that's an important, crucial piece of the story

that I feel like doesn't get told nearly enough. Yeah. And I feel like when I read your book, I get that sense of like, oh, yeah, it can be, it can be flourishing, it can be easy, it can be positive, it can be pleasurable. And like, if I think about like, okay, we have to clear away everything that's in the way of that, it feels more approachable as a topic, rather than, oh, it's this fraught thing, you have to do everything perfectly. Right. And if you don't, it's going to be a disaster. No, no, no, no.

Actually, the natural state of sex is, it's good. Yeah. Even given the fact that we've done so much as a society, to mess it up. Yeah. It's still the case. Yeah. Across all the power and balances that we were talking about,

across all of the like messed up toxic rape culture norms, across all of that, usually it's pretty great. You know, not everybody likes it. Ace people are real. That's fine. Sure.

But for like the large majority of people, this is like a big part of our pleasure and flourishing and our self-expression. And we need to talk about that too. Yeah. I'm so grateful for you for writing the book and for coming on and talk about it. today. It's like been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. It was really fun.

Well, thank you so much again to Quill for coming on the show. I love this conversation. If you want to pick up a copy of their new books, sex beyond, yes. Head to our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Just a reminder, every book you purchase there supports not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you'd like to support the show directly that URL once again, patreon.com slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month. Get to every episode of the show, ad free. For 15 bucks a month, I'll read your name. in the credits. This week, I just chose some at random. I'm going to thank G.D. Sillia, Howard and Kevin, Faith Murkan, Michael Lurer, Darren K., Matthew Reimer, S.R., and a screaming Batman.

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