The Dispatch Podcast - Let's Talk About Sex

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

Sarah and her guest are here to talk about sex. Christine Emba, a columnist for the Washington Post and author of the new book Rethinking Sex, examines our current sexual mores and finds them wanting. What’s the cause of today’s sexual malaise? What does a new sexual ethic look like? Listen (but maybe not with your young children) for those answers and more.   Show Notes: -“Rethinking Sex” by Christine Emba -Christine in the Washington Post: “Consent is not enough. We need a new sexual ethic.” -David in The Atlantic: “Consent Was Never Enough” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger. And this week, we are talking to Christine Emba, a friend of mine who is always such an interesting deep thinker on so many areas of philosophy, but she has published a book. Now, she's normally a columnist for the Washington Post, so you can always see her stuff there. But this book, well, the subheadline is a provocation. And oh, boy, is it. So it's called Rethinking Sex, a Provocation, we'll put the link in the show notes. And I don't want to spoil anything. We're going to jump right in. Let's dive right in.

Christine, you and I worked out that we are about four and a half years apart. you're just under five years younger than I am, but in that time, a world of difference has emerged culturally in the experience of dating. So just to start out with, can you give me what you think the average date right now is for a, you know, late 20s, early 30s person in the United States, woman in the United States? Yeah, we did work that out. I think that the biggest change has probably just been the advent and preponderance of dating apps, actually. So what would what would the most common date be, a first date? I'm thinking you have swiped through a bunch of people on Hinge or Tinder. You match with somebody. You texted back and forth for long enough that you've finally

decided that you're going to meet in person. So you go to a bar probably or a restaurant, but most likely a bar where if you're a woman or I guess if you're the man too and we're assuming kind of heterosexual dates here you're sort of standing around waiting for the person to appear to see if they look like what they said they would look like on the app that's the first thing then you meet them in person they come in you meet them in person for the first time and you sit down for half an hour to an hour's worth of awkward but hopefully not awkward conversation and then maybe you both leave and you decide whether you're going to see each other again, or if ostensibly things go really well, you might leave together.

And a lot of your book is dedicated to the concept that consent is now both the floor and the ceiling for all dating sexual encounters. Walk through some of how we got there. Yeah. So that's one of the main critiques, I guess. It's one of the main focuses of the book Rethinking Sex. It's first the idea that, you know, sex is good, and the more sex we have, the better. That to be sort of a healthy, modern young person, you're living a really sex positive, active sex life.

And then there's the idea that sort of the only standard for what good looks like, the only thing that you really need to achieve before having sex with someone is to get their consent. So basically you have to have agreed with the other person, you know, that you're, that you're willing to do this so that whatever sex you have is not statedly kind of against their will. And then you can go forth. And that's the only thing that can really be judged. Did you get consent? Not did the person feel good after or why did they consent to you? But just do you have the thing. And you, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you consider yourself a feminist. Do you consider yourself on the political spectrum, left of center, I assume? Yeah, I mean, I definitely consider myself a feminist. Politically, I think I'm mostly identified as left of center, although, you know, Michelle Goldberg wrote about rethinking sex a week or two ago, and she seemed a little bit confused. She was like, Christine Mbeth, it's a heterodox thinker.

She quotes from Roger Scruton and Andrew Torkin. And that's true at a lot of cases, actually. I don't really pigeonhole myself on either side of the line. When you walk through the history of how we got here, and by here, I really mean to this place where dating has become really unfulfilling for a lot of people. And the reason I wanted to start with what a normal date is these days is because, again, just with our five-year gap, I never was on Hinge or Tinder and you still dated through mutual friends or someone you met at school or like you knew this person somehow. Someone had vouched for them already as not a serial killer. And at the same time, I think partly because maybe I just grew up in a more like rural. conservative environment, but also because I identify as conservative, my sort of mores around sex were probably different. And so I think what we have now is that women who are told that

being feminist means, as you say, not just sex positive in the sense that like sex isn't dirty or something like that. But more than that, like you should be having sex all the time. It's a physical act, that's all. Casual sex is good and you should be enjoying casual sex. And you say that maybe that's not true for everyone. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I critique in rethinking sex or one of the threads that runs through it as a sort of skepticism of what I call uncritical sex positivity. And it's exactly that. You know, there's this idea. I think it's more visible among progressives, but it has actually kind of become a cultural feeling that, yeah, to be modern, to be liberated, to be uninhibited is, A, the best thing that you can be.

And B, you sort of prove that by being sex positive, having as much, you know, sex as you can and enjoying it and not having too many feelings about it, exactly, like treating it as just a fun thing that you're finally able to do and you should be out there doing it. But isn't there something deeply unfeminist about that? Isn't that just so when I think about the waves of feminism, for instance, The second wave of feminism for me is this idea that to get ahead, women just need to move into the male spheres and then be better at the male spheres. So when they wear a pants suit, it's an awesome pants suit versus those black ones men

have to wear. And when they have sex, yeah, they watch pornography, they have casual sex and they're going to be better at it than men, care less than men, they can do the same thing that men do. but third way feminism for me is like no no women are different our feelings are different what we bring to the table is different we don't wear pantsuits we wear power dresses those sheath dresses man i i do i feel more powerful in a sheath dress than anything else um and when it comes to sex i don't bring to the table uh that i'm better at casual sex than men in fact the opposite i bring to the table this idea of building something together, whether it's marriage or not, just like

a relationship and feelings and finding something in the other. And isn't that feminism? Yeah. No, totally. So I also, first of all, I want to state my similar objection to the tyranny of the hot girl pantsuit, which I think that we're moving away from, at least I hope. I think, you know, like the hashtag girl boss is kind of gone out of fashion among gentsy and younger people. And I think that's great. But this is also one of the things that I write about in the book. You know, the sexual revolution happened for a reason and the feminist movement happened for a reason. You know, we wanted to see more acknowledgement of women as people,

acknowledgement of women's agency and their equality with men, their ability to be in the world and exist as real people. This was great. But, you know, even the early feminists of the second wave during the sexual revolution, originally we're not advocating for, well, women should just become like men. The idea was that women would be respected on their own grounds as women, as equal to men, but still different. You know, difference does not mean inequality.

It just means that we're respecting both women and men for. and men for what they individually bring to the table. But, you know, that sort of truth became harder to sustain and harder to make clear, I think it was in some ways co-opted by media movement, by marketing, by capitalism, frankly, which made it much easier to say, well, like, equality and respecting everyone and growing everyone into, you know, more loving beings in that themselves, complicated.

what if we just made men the standard and just said that women have to be more like the standard? And that's kind of where we've ended up today, where the expectation of equality is not, you know, I'm equally valuing women and men, though different for what they both bring to the table, but I can value women more, the more they become like men. And in the sexual realm, that's, you know, exactly what we see. The pressure is on women to act like men. and not even just like men in some cases, but, you know, kind of the most callous sort of least caring kind of man, which is the person who tends to wield power because they don't

care about anyone else. Right. It sets the default as the person who cares the least. You know, I think the best analogy is braburning to me. It was very cool and cutting edge to burn your bra in the 60s and early 70s as a sign of releasing yourself from the bondage of femininity. But it turns out that not wearing a bra is painful. And so now we have entire industries that are making good bras, more comfortable bras. They're not about, you know, pushing things up and out. They're about letting you go about your daily life

pain free in a positive way. And like, to me, it's the perfect analogy of what the second wave, like, good intentions. I'm glad they did it. I would have been. been burning my bra right there too. And then you're like, okay, but they did exist for a reason. Let's make them better bras, not burn the bras. That is a perfect analogy. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you know, even the earliest feminists, you know, Jermaine Greer, Ellen Willis, all of Andrea Dorkin, all of these people actually kind of cautioned against, you know, this idea that women should become like men. They were for women. But unfortunately, that part of the movement kind of got run over and went into a different direction, the sort of playboy or playmate direction, where

the best woman- Oh, let's talk about porn. You know, is a playmate. Yeah. Porn was meant to liberate women. You know, was it though? Please continue. Well, I mean, that's like that's the question, right? Who is porn made for usually? It's not usually made for women. It's usually made for men. It's usually made for men. and it sort of aligns itself and, you know, is made to satisfy kind of a male gaze, if you will. And I think what we're actually seeing now in this culture, and this kind of goes back to what you were saying a little bit before, there's almost a weird pressure on women to sort of align themselves with this male vision. You know, they're told by, you know, sex in the city or, like, other media shows that actually

the coolest, most modern woman loves porn. Like, actually, women who love porn are enlightened. So if you want to be a modern, enlightened person, you should get into it. Watch porn like men do. Be a porn star. Being a porn star is fun. That's really cool. And, you know, I don't know that many, I don't know that most women actually feel that way.

but especially among the young women who I talked to for this book, they felt so much kind of ambient pressure almost to agree with that view. Like an ambient pressure that that was what being a modern person looked like, that that was what they needed to do to be seen as, you know, cool or enlightened. And so they would have these sexual encounters. They would, you know, go along with sort of these porn-inspired sexual practices from guys they were seeing because they were sort of under the delusion that that's just what they needed to do. That's what they were supposed to be doing. That's the story, right? That's how you

grow up. And then they're left feeling really bad. I think it's really easy for someone listening to this who is my age or older to say, fine, then don't. Don't have anal sex because you think men need anal sex. And by the way, we are going to earn our explicit rating today. but I and don't have don't go home with the guy and have sex with him after meeting him at a bar for 30 minutes because you think that's what you're supposed to do like have some agency have some respect for yourself but I think it misses the cultural shift that has happened because if it does become the expectation and actually all women are doing this then by saying like well no I don't have sex with someone I just met after 30 minutes you become what back in my day was like the wait for marriage. people. Like, that's fine, but it puts you in kind of a very specific bucket that is outside sort of the norm. And then you become that person, which is, again, fine. But if basically, when the culture moves on from what I would consider actually sort of a feminism, you know, sex feminism movement into a male as the default sex standard, it's going to be very hard.

to be the one to say, no, I don't belong to that. Yeah. So in the last chapter of rethinking sex, I actually talk about this phenomenon kind of explicitly through the eyes of interviews with virgins, like older virgins. And the ways that they describe themselves and how stigmatized they feel for their choices is really fascinating. I mean, one guy, you know, says, or one woman, actually, It's like not having erotic capital, not being part of the sexual marketplace. That's a serious thing in our world. I mean, practically everyone has sex, so what's wrong with me?

And this is what she's telling herself. And, you know, the ongoing cultural obsession with having sex and having sex freely can actually harm women and men because, you know, it defines not only what you can't do without fear of stigma, but also what you have to do to avoid feeling shame or inadequacy. And, you know, the project of sex positivity was meant to increase our independence and empowerment, especially for women. But being pressured into a single understanding of what you have to do is the opposite of personal freedom. That's not the freedom that, you know, we were supposed to be promised here. And I think a lot of people are waking up to that fact.

but they're still living in this sort of ambient culture. You know, all of the sort of media and magazine and other pressures are pointing them towards this vision of what sex positivity looks like. So it does feel weird to be the one person who's pushing back. And part of the project at this book actually was kind of to say to women and men who are feeling this way, like if you think that there's something kind of crazy

happening in our sexual culture, like if you feel that something is off, like, you're not crazy. Actually, the culture is kind of crazy right now. And what we have to do is talk about why that's happening and how to move forward. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy

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I think about sex, this is a deeply philosophical book. And I want to make sure we spend a lot of time on the philosophical aspects you bring to this. And what you think should replace consent as both that floor and ceiling, obviously consent has to be the floor. But the ceiling, when you think about what is good sex, it's more than consent. And one of the examples that I thought you made so well is this idea of sex positivity that we don't kink shame, right? The idea that if someone's into something weird, you don't make them feel shame for being into that weird thing. That's kink shaming and that's on you for making them feel weird and you're the bad person. And you approach this from a very philosophical standpoint saying, but aren't some kinks morally less than other things? And when we

seek what is that ceiling, how can that, how can those blend? Yeah, you hit on kind of one the more controversial parts of the book, actually, that I've received maybe the most pushback on, actually. So rethinking sex kind of has two main threads. One is sort of a critique of consent as our only standard for sex. And as you say correctly, I argue that it's a baseline. It's super necessary. And in many cases, we haven't even achieved that baseline. But it was never meant to be a ceiling. It can't be a ceiling. It's sort of a legal contract. And that's not how we want to think of our relationships. But the other half of the book is kind of critiquing these assumptions that we sort of hold

as a culture around sex and suggesting that, well, we might want to rethink some of them. And one of them is exactly this, the idea that the assumption that we've made, rather, that desire is almost sacred, that our desires say nothing about us, they're just what we want, and actually the best way of living life is to fulfill our desires. with consent, of course. And once you have consent, then anything that happens after can't really be judged.

It's between two consenting adults. It's just two people fulfilling their desires and being happy. Why do you hate people being happy, Christine Mbba? But, you know, again, I argue for kind of a higher standard here. We are human beings. We're not animals.

While we do have desires, we are capable of asking ourselves or we should be asking ourselves does this desire, and fulfilling this desire, does this longing help make me a better person? Is this good for society? Is enacting this with another person actually morally good, which is different from just being allowed, but actually ethical, morally good? And I suggest that, yes, in fact, some desires may be less morally good than others. And this is a sort of judgment call that people don't really appreciate these.

days. I think culturally there's a real emphasis on, you know, like, no judging, no kink shaming. Like, we want people to be free to be who they are. And of course, shaming has been used, you know, to bad ends historically. But also, I think it's possible to say that kinks or desires that, you know, focus on objectifying or dehumanizing or degrading your partner are objectively worse than, you know, a desire to, you know, care, a desire to improve your partner, a desire to love. And you know, you think about the things that, you know, women are asked to do in sexual encounters often, often, again, inspired by pornography. And you're like, why do we think this is good? Why have we decided that this is

okay, or more than okay, should be entering the mainstream as quickly as it is? And what does that say on a macro level about our sexual culture, that we're mainstreaming desires to, you know, degrade people, to harm people, to surprise, choke people in sexual encounters. It's interesting to me because this could be a stand-in for another, a larger part of our conversation as a culture, that this idea that shame is bad is a relatively new one.

And while I think it is obvious that there are ways to use shame that are bad, If you get rid of shame entirely in a culture, the only thing you are left with is law. And you actually don't want to live in a society where law is the only standard, like consent, right, as this floor, but also sealing, you know, making everything illegal. Well, then you've got a different problem, everything that used to just be shame-based, more encounters with police, more mass incarceration for things that are, you know, not that bad. that we could have taken care of in a community by simply saying that's not okay, but instead we've decided that shame itself is always bad instead of like most things in life. There are good ways to use shame and bad ways to use shame. Shaming a woman for having sex before marriage, that's bad shame. But as you say, shaming someone, a man for surprise

choking his partner during sex, which I agree with you, you know, again, if both people are actually positively into that, then no problem. But if it's just a consent issue, that's not enough because the purpose of that can be to degrade your partner. And so you create a new standard that we should have instead of consent. And, you know, if consent is sort of the Montagnan version of where we are. You know, whatever we're in, find the good in that. It's good. You should be feeling happy because you're doing it, basically. There's a different standard that you create, which to me is a little more, what is it, more Pascali maybe? You could say that. So, you know, again, and I feel like I have to keep saying this again and

again because people would say what, like you don't like consent, enthusiastic consent or affirmative consent is really important. And I'm saying, of course it is. But we need a higher standard for our relationships than just, I did not feloniously assault this other person. And so I propose as an ideal, the idea of willing the good of the other, which is Aristotle by way of St. Thomas Aquinas, actually. And it was his definition of love. And so willing the good of the other invokes a responsibility to care for the other person as much as you would care for yourself. But it also invokes this question of the good. So trying to understand what the moral good would be in a situation and for your particular partner and trying to achieve that with and for them.

So that's actually a lot more responsibility than just, you know, getting past the goalpost of consent. That involves, you know, empathy and communication and also, in many cases, putting your own desires or longings to the side as you decide whether you can help the other person achieve the good. It's a higher standard, of course, and, you know, it's one that a lot of people won't even reach if they're trying. But just trying to do that is so many steps further ahead of where we are now. And, you know, when I talk to men and women about, you know, the current sexual culture, their sexual lives, they had a lot of complaints. But when I asked, you know, okay, what would a good sexual encounter look like? Like, what would a good sexual world look like? So many of them said the same things.

You know, they said it would look like empathy. It would look like the other person listening to me as one woman very, very young. memorably put it. She said she sort of burst out with this line in the middle of a kind of aggressive sexual encounter. She said, can we not love each other for a single day? Even if it's just a single day, even if it's just this one hour or a few days that we're here together, can we not actually approach each other in love, not just getting what we can from the other person? It'd be interesting to me as we think about so much of the process problems that we're having on college campuses around consent. And as you said, look,

I'm also a very consent enthusiast and that believe that we have not reached, even that floor and so many sexual encounters of what affirmative consent would really look like. And it's a problem that we're having on college campuses. But I think part of that problem is that we're making our conversations with these kids all and only about consent. And so then they are so obsessed with, did I meet that minimum standard? Is she sober enough to consent? That is not what we should be telling these kids. It should almost be, it should be the first thing we say for 30 seconds and then move on to everything that you're saying, because consent is so built into what you're saying at such a fundamental level, you can't even get anywhere in the vicinity, in the neighborhood,

in the country of willing the good of the other, if you don't have affirmative consent, not just minimum consent, not just, I won't get arrested for this later consent. And when you think about when we talk about false accusations, I actually think that that is part of this problem as well, because what happens is, you know, for however many false accusations you think are out there,

the vast majority of that minority of false accusations tend to come around because, you know, maybe she gave affirmative consent, but he wasn't willing the good of the other. She felt hurt by the encounter, sometimes physically hurt, but definitely emotionally or mentally hurt by the encounter. And then there's this accusation because she feels like she was taken advantage of, even assaulted, despite the affirmative consent. And so we call that a false. accusation when under the Christine Emba world of sexual encounters, I don't think those would happen nearly as often. I don't think so. I think you're really right, because if you are trying to will the good of the other, you take care. You know, I quoted from the Stoic Epictetus in the book, when you receive an invitation to pleasure, pause. If you are willing the good of the other, you have to, you know, kind of stop and think about whether you would be able to do that in many circumstances. So if you are too drunk, or if the other person is too drunk to kind of know what they want to even talk to them, then yeah, you won't be able to will their good,

in which case you probably shouldn't be having sex with them. In some ways, it speaks to perhaps a push to having less casual sex. If you don't know the person, their desires anything about them well enough to will they're good, then maybe don't sleep with them. And that actually might be a safer option in a lot of cases. But again, this also means that we have to start thinking of sex as something meaningful and real that we can talk about in moral terms. So not just what is allowed, this sort of legalistic framing, but what should we be doing to be good, and that could bring us to a much better place. There's also the question, and this I talk about in the book a lot,

going back to what you were saying about shame. One of the things that I've heard from so many young women and men, especially recently, is that because there don't seem to be any rules except for the rule of get consent, there aren't like clear norms or standards for what you should be doing except for this bottom baseline everybody feels a little bit lost and confused like okay well what are you supposed to be doing like what is there a shared understanding of what a date should look like or what sex should mean nobody really knows in some cases and that actually makes the

whole process of dating of trying to relate to each other as men and women, really stressful. And then when you have bad encounters, there's no recourse, really, other than saying, well, it was consented to or not. But there isn't language to describe, you know, this felt bad to me or like this surprisingly rough sex that I didn't ask for was bad for some other reason.

Like there's no outside standard to point to. Yeah, the, I think, I hope, but I also believe that most men, as you say, when you ask them what's missing from there, what would be an ideal sex life, they talk about empathy and, you know, both people sort of mutually feeling something that is not simply the physical act of intercourse. And as I think you put really well in the book, it means then that sex is something else. And particularly for women, though not all, only for women. I think sex is something more than the physical. And we know that because when you think about orgasms, female orgasms, and sex, they are far more likely to occur with repeat partners and a long-term partner than they are in a one-night, you know, first encounter. And I think that that can be confusing for men, too, based on pornography and other societal expectations. They feel like failures because they're not able to, you know, get that woman to climax when he met her 30 minutes ago. And he's doing all the physical things right. He's

pushing all the buttons on the machine. Why isn't the, you know, the output happening? And then you get into this situation where, and I'm so interested because this is not in the book, but I want to get your take on it, where I would assume there's a lot of pressure on women to then simply fake the orgasm. And then you're creating the cycle of men thinking that after meeting someone for 30 minutes, they are then basically working on this machine type environment. And so I always had a philosophy of never fake whether you're having a good time because the other person needs to learn. And the only way they're going to learn is through truth. And to your point about willing the good of the other, sometimes willing the good of the other is saying like, that was good, but it wasn't great.

And so next time, let's do this, this, and this. But it has to be repeat encounters for that willing of the good to function. And there has to be based on truth. And if you don't know the person and you feel so insecure that you can't be truthful with them physically, emotionally, then you're not going to have good sex. You're not going to have that positive sexual life that commercials are telling you that you can have. Right. I think that's so true. I mean, there's a wealth of research, and I cite this in the book,

as well about this orgasm gap, right, that women are just more, far more likely to achieve pleasure in repeated encounters with someone who cares about them, who is, you know, kind of put the time and thought into trying to help them have a good time, which is usually not just a stranger. You've met at a bar that one night. And also that, you know, an emotional connection matters for women perhaps more than men, but also men too. But I think to your larger point about honesty, like that is, I think that is the main thing that I'm trying to do with rethinking sex, the book, is that we have a lot of cultural assumptions about sex that have been, you know, pushed on us by commercials, by sort of the stories we tell each other, by bad or mixed

understandings of what the feminist movement wanted or what the sexual revolution was supposed to do. the first step towards moving to a better sexual culture is just being honest with ourselves about which assumptions we've imbibed and whether they're false, whether they should be changed, whether, you know, maybe we're just not right. And that goes for, you know, the common understanding that I feel like a lot of young people have that the best sexual encounter is, you know, I guess we're just, We do have an explicit radio this podcast, so we will earn it. Erica Young writes about the, or wrote about the ziplas fuck in the book Fear of Flying.

And the idea was that the best sexual encounter is one in which two people come to it as total strangers. They have no desires from each other, pass this encounter. They part ways, they never have to see each other again. It's totally free. And in many cases, it feels like to young people that that's, you know, that's the, you know, the best way to have sex. Like total freedom is the ideal. And maybe we should be honest with ourselves and say, actually, no. Actually, most people do want to be in a relationship and cared for. Or the idea that, you know, sex doesn't mean anything, that it's just a physical

action that I guess you get better out with repeat practice with partners. And, you know, in talking to like a young woman who told me about her sexual assault, in fact, for this book, She muses about how sexual assault feels uniquely bad and is seen as uniquely bad because maybe sex is a unique thing that has a particular meaning, and maybe we should respect that. And so being honest about the fact that sex is meaningful, that sex can have consequences, that it's not just a physical action. or even to go very far back to the question of dating apps, right? You know, we have this idea that it's awesome that we're on dating apps and we can sort of have these encounters privately

with sort of no accountability to our friends or family. Like, it's not my mom setting me up on a date, finally. But actually, there is something good about having a community at least a little bit involved in the setting up of relationships so that somebody is keeping an eye on you so that, you know, people don't feel as free to act like their worst selves on a date because they know that, in fact, maybe their friends or family or colleagues might shame them. And this could actually be like a good and useful role for shame to play.

And being able to be honest about the fact that, like, this maybe goes against sort of our very modern bias towards total freedom and autonomy. But we might have actually gotten some of those things wrong. And that is actually harming our sexual culture and making people sad. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door. Yep.

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when you and I first talked about this book, I mean, this could have been a 500-page book, as far as I'm concerned. There's so many interesting ways to go. And you talked about how you had to keep refocusing. Like, nope, nope, stick to the thesis. I'm curious, what are some of the paths that you could have gone down in the 500-page version of rethinking sex, that would have been fun. Oh, I'm like, well, fun is one word for it. I'll say that first, if you write about sex or like writing a book about sex and you tell people that, people will just come to you and tell you stories about their sex lives,

about things that happened to them. They're just like thoughts and feelings about sex. And that can be really interesting. And in some cases, really sad. You know, like this story that I write about in the book of the girl who corners me at a party to, you know, ask if it's okay for her to not like the fact that her partner is going back to this, you know, sort of chokes her during sex and she doesn't know what to say because she consented to it.

but like, is that okay? What should I do, Christine? Hard to answer. You're not a sex columnist. You're a moral philosopher writing about sex. There's a slight difference. Yeah, but even that, like even an encounter like that brings up so many paths you could go down. First of all, there's just, you know, asking questions about when did certain acts become normalized and what does that say about our society? Like, can, Can we talk more about why people feel so uncomfortable having really open and honest conversations about sex and not just, you know, I think people feel more comfortable having conversations about sex the act, but not about, you know, what sex means or what relationships should look like or what they're experiencing that they don't necessarily find pleasant in the long term? I think there was like a whole chapter about just what sex ed could look like. Yes, I was just thinking about that in particular, especially as we're having all these conversations about what is age appropriate books and sexual orientation and gender identity for elementary school students.

And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, I don't even know that we're there yet because we still have the worst sex ed. And I don't even know worse compared to what. I mean, I just think the worst. Like, anything else would be better than what we're doing. Yeah, it's not good. I mean, another writer described our system of sex at as teaching someone how to drive a car by, like, pointing to all the different mechanisms and, like, explaining how sort of the brakes work

and how you put the key into the ignition. But never explaining what those, you know, red, eight-sided objects are on the street, that you sometimes see or like, oh, there are lights. Just like, don't think about the lights right now. We don't, we don't talk about the lights. Yeah, we don't need to know how to merge onto the freeway. The freeway, you'll learn it when you get there. It'll be obvious to you how to merge onto the freeway.

Right. We talk about mechanics, but we don't talk about any larger meaning to the question. And so, you know, I would have loved to have spent more time on that. And, you know, I was raised in the evangelical Christian tradition and I converted to Catholicism, actually. And there's like an odd mirror play in some ways between how purity culture doesn't really teach people about sex in a helpful way. It's like, don't have sex until you're married, that it will be amazing. But if you've made a mistake, you're a rose with all of your petals plucked off or something. And that doesn't give people a very helpful understanding about sex in the same way that sex means nothing.

Just like do whatever you want. like don't critique your feelings at all is also unhelpful. So what's going on with these two extremes? How to eat? Yeah, there were a lot of roads. And on the reception that you've gotten on the book, there is something, I got to say. It's funny reading it because the words in the book are very progressive language. Like the lingua franca is the progressive movement's words, but the book is very conservative.

And I'm curious what the reception has been from writers on the right. David French wrote one of his newsletters for the Atlantic on this. We'll put that in the show notes as well for people who want to read David's take. David and I, of course, gushed about you separately from all of this. And then there's writers on the left who have written about your book. And I'm curious where they've agreed, where they've disagreed, where you agree, where you disagree. Yeah, the reception has been. pretty positive, I think, because I do think that we are in a moment where the ills,

the sort of malaise in our sexual culture has become too visible to ignore. Like, young people are having less sex. They're dating less. They're talking about how they feel miserable, even though they're supposedly liberated. And, you know, finally, people are asking questions. There's an openness to this conversation. At the same time, there still is this pushback to the idea of any sort of standards or norms because there's almost this reflective sort of fear of being judgmental or of being judged personally. And so if somebody writes about sex in kind of a critical way, the first pushback is like, you just want to take us back to the medieval era.

Like you just want to take us back to before the sexual revolution and we can't have that. But I think when people read the book, it resonates with them because they kind of see these problems playing out. And they too want to have space to rethink them, to think about how to do sex better. And, you know, like that's why the subtitle is a provocation. You know, it's not supposed to be a provocation to just make people mad indiscriminately, although there are some people who, if you even talk about critiquing sex at all, just get really mad indiscriminately, and there's nothing you can do about those. That's called Twitter.

That's, yes, actually. That's called a special set of men on Twitter who are really scared of sex being criticized, which says more about them than about what's in the book. But anyway, it's a provocation to conversation, to being able to ask these questions aloud to talk about morality and ethics in the public square, to acknowledge that sex may be actually bigger and more meaningful than we've talked about before, and have those conversations with each other in hopes that we can begin to build something better. And last question, the cover of your book is amazing. It looks like a 19th century painting of a red-haired woman sort of frustratingly biting some flowers as she looks askance. And it is so perfect as the cover of this book about rethinking sex. And I know that you personally, of course, did not draw your cover art.

But how did this come about? Because it's incredible. And it, to me, is it just sometimes. the covers don't really work with what's inside the book. And this one is the opposite. I can't imagine one of those like moderny covers that's just like some shapes and colors. This is perfect.

Yeah. So in describing art on a podcast, I always feel like one of those alt text generators, like woman with hair and flowers. But you are right. It is called, it's a piece called Love Shadow by the pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick, And it was painted in 1867.

And this also was, you were right about the process. You know, we're given when you write a book, like a couple of cover options. And many of the ones I was shown were the sort of Malcolm Gladwell. Yes, exactly. And then there's like a picture of a heart or something. And I was like, this is boring. It's two stick figures. Yeah.

Horizontally. Yeah. And I was like, that doesn't quite get. it. And I love Ardenpherry-Raphaelite art. And so when I was sort of this picture, I was like this, like the face of this woman, she's so frustrated. It just totally encapsulates how so many people feel about sex in this moment. And then just sort of like the lushness of an oil painting and like drawing it back to real life and real people's faces, experiences, expressions in some way just seemed really right to me. So I just fell in mind. I just fell in

for this painting. It's like we have to use this one. I can't believe this is real. I thought it was made for this book because her expression so perfectly encapsulates the entirety of the book. It's impossible that this was drawn 150 years ago. Wow. Wow. All right. Well, we're going to have to leave it there. But guys, this book, you will speed through it. I like stayed up till two in the morning one night, just wanting to finish it because every page had some new nugget where I was like, yes, oh my gosh, of course. I hadn't thought about it that way. Rethinking sex, a provocation by Christine Emba. We'll have it in the show notes. And look, if nothing else, you have to check out the cover. It's very, very cool. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for that great

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