CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Feminists have long challenged the ways in which men tend to sexualize women. But pioneering activist, biologist, and trans woman Julia Serano argues that sexualization is a far more pervasive problem—it’s something that we all do to other people, often without being aware of it. In her latest book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back, Julia examines how the stereotypes of sexualization push minorities farther into the margins, and how even the privileged are policed from transgressing, or they also become targets. In this episode, Julia is joined in a conversation with writer and editor Abeni Jones that exposes the harmful ways we are all sexualized and shares ways of seeking a bold path for resistance. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on July 21st, 2022. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

[Theme music concludes] 

Abeni Jones: Hi, Julia! How are you? 

Julia Serano: Hello. Happy to be here.  

Abeni: So, I am also really happy to be here and I'm excited to be having this conversation with you. I appreciate you for doing it and for writing this excellent book. The first thing that I would like to ask you, is what briefly is this book about? Why did you want to write about this topic?  

Julia: Sure. I would say the book more broadly is about sex and sexuality and usually when people write about sex and sexuality, they define them as things that people are, or that possess or that they do, and I was very interested, have been for quite a long time in how we perceive and interpret these facets of people and our world.  

In particular when I transitioned from male to female back in the early 2000s and people tend to get very focused on trans people's experiences of like, you know, people being fascinated about how we change, our transitions, our transformations and for me it was kind of the opposite, it was the thing that was really fascinating to me was how much the world changed around me. As soon as people started reading me as a woman rather than a man, they just started making all sorts of different assumptions, projecting expectations and meanings onto me. And so, I talk about that in the book. That's a big part of it, looking into these double standards about why we project certain sexual meanings and motives on to some people, but not others.  

But the part that was most intense for me, as far as double standards go was experiencing sexualization. So as one can imagine, I began to experience a lot of the forms of sexualization that young women in our culture tend to face and that feminists have long discussed. You know, such as objectification and slut shaming sexual harassment and all the way to outright sexual violence. A lot of what past feminists have said about that resonated with me and helped me kind of understand those experiences. But then I had all these other experiences where people knew that I was transgender and saw me as a trans woman rather than a cisgender woman. In those cases, I found that I was also sexualized, but in different ways. So, people would view me as a sexual predator or sexually deviant or promiscuous or they view me as undesirable, as exotic, as a fetish, object.  

And all of these different forms of sexualizations share the fact that a person is reduced to just being a sexual being and that in our culture tends to have a degrading or delegitimizing effect on people. And so, I wanted to understand that and present all forms of sexualization to try to show how they are interconnected and to try to find ways of challenging it that will foster sexual equity without sacrificing sexual difference in the process.  

Abeni: Hmm. Well, some of the process you describe as sexualization, right, that you were discussing the projection of assumptions and meanings and identities and ideas onto people. There are a few mindsets and ideologies that you described in the book that kind of form the foundation of that sexualization that you describe. Both that happen to all of us but particularly you were just discussing ciswomen and then there's kind of a slightly different alternate type of sexualization that occurs for transwomen than for other people in society. One of the first ideas that you really discuss in the book is this idea that men and women as categories are opposite and that- and you use a filing cabinet analogy, can you discuss that a little bit and explain what you mean with that analogy?  

Julia: Sure. Yeah, those are the first two mindsets I talk about in the book. So, it’s the two filing cabinets mindset and the opposite sign set, and together they make up what most of us would call the gender binary, but I found it useful to talk about them somewhat separately.  

So, the two filing cabinets mindset is the fact that I have had this experience, other people have had this experience where particularly when I was at sort of the so-called in between point in my transition rather than people viewing me is gender ambiguous and not being able to understand who I was and being confused and saying, are you a boy or are you a girl? Which I would occasionally get, but that wasn't usually what I experienced, what I most experienced was people either reading me as male or reading me as female but not one or the other and as soon as people do that, they tend to filter out all this other stuff about you. So, someone who would read me as a woman wouldn't- tended not to notice aspects about me that were male, or masculine, and vice versa. So, this is something we do, and I also cite research that's been done into how we categorize people according to gender. So, I think that it's useful that we basically put people in one cabinet or the other and it's really hard for us to think about there being any overlap whatsoever.  

Then the opposites mindset is just the idea that we tend to view you in this case, we not only view gender dichotomously, but we assume that they are opposite. So, these are ideas that we’re very used to hearing, the idea that men are strong, and women are weak, or that men are active, and women are passive, or that men are practical while women are frivolous or ornamental and so on and so on. In the book I have a table of opposites that kind of lists a lot of these popular presumptions. And we all know that isn't true, that they're strong women and weak men or that you know, no person is like completely passive or completely active, right. These are just very clearly opposites, but they very much inform, a lot of the meanings and particularly the sexual meanings that we project onto women and men.  

So, the idea that men are active when women are passive really plays a role in how we kind of consider how sex is supposed to happen. Men are the active party and women are the passive party who men act upon, right and that was a lot of why I wanted to put that in there. I should also say that the opposites mindset also works…we tend to view different types of groups dichotomously and when we do that, we tend to often project the opposites on them and sometimes these opposites overlap with the ones we project onto maleness versus femaleness, and other times, they're different sets. But in all cases, they're kind of these unconscious meanings that we project onto people.  

Abeni: Yeah, I've always thought that the idea that men and women are opposite is really prevalent in our culture and it's kind of bizarre. But we do so much of that kind of thinking to the degree that a lot of people think they like cats and dogs are opposite for example, instead of thinking that they're just like different in the same way that they're both animals or whatever. It's similar to how men and women are also, maybe they have some observable difference or something but the idea that they’re opposite is actually kind of bizarre. But one of the things that you- 

Julia: I'm glad you brought up- sorry, I was just going to add, I'm glad you brought up cats and dogs because not only do people see cats and dogs as opposites, but a lot of people kind of gender cats as feminine and dogs as masculine. [Abeni: Yeah.]  So, this is kind of the infectious way that like these meanings can kind of get out there and shake the way we see the world even though if we step back, we realize that's not a rational outlook.  

Abeni: Yeah, and I don't know how I feel about the gendering of my cat, for example, he’s male, but the vast majority of people who meet my cat, they'll use the she/her pronouns because that's so prevalent that we think of cats as female and dogs as male. But one of the ways that this plays out, that you described in the book is like, depending on which filing cabinet someone puts you into in their mind; and they're only generally two options, the man, or the woman cabinet. Your actions are interpreted differently and sometimes it's the exact same action, but depending on which category, they put you into, there are like you said, sometimes your actions are just ignored but other times they're given completely different meaning.  

Julia: Yeah. A common example that I use, and I mentioned in the book, is that when I was moving through the world as male, there were certain times where I would get assertive, argumentative, in a particular situation and whenever that happened people might have disagreed with the argument I was making or what I was asserting but they never complained about the fact that I was being assertive. But then as soon as I transitioned and people started reading me as female, that exact same behavior people immediately started, they would call me a bitch right. Or they would presume that it was like my time of the month, right. Even though I don't have times of the month. But they projected it they assumed because I was acting as a-typical that they would recognize and name it in a way that it would just be the unaccepted norm when people were reading me as male.  

Abeni: One of the most important or powerful, I guess, or pervasive ways that you talk about this division in the way things are interpreted, is you talked about the predator/prey dynamic. That folks who are interpreted to be in the male filing cabinet are expected to and encouraged to be predators when it comes to or to embody a kind of predator action set of actions or mindset when it comes to sex. And people who are in the woman filing cabinet or encouraged and expected to be the prey. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic and how that kind of plays out and how you discuss that in the book? 

Julia: Sure. Yeah. So, I think that these ideas tend to be so common that I kind of go out of my way in the book to demonstrate that this is how we view the world and not necessarily how men and women are. Even though, you know, anyone can point to examples of men who are predatory, right? But the idea behind it, is that men are seen as sexual initiators or aggressors and women are the sexual objects that men pursue and desire.  

One way in which this plays out is in the sexual script that we're all kind of taught. Nobody ever sat down and taught this to me, but just from watching movies and watching the world around me as a child being socialized in our culture. I just understood that this is how things are supposed to work as do most of us and the idea is that well the man is the aggressor, the pursuer. So, he makes the first move and all subsequent moves. So, he acts, whereas the woman reacts, and she can react by either accepting or acquiescing to his, to his moves, or she can try to fend him off or you know, try to stop him in his tracks, right. 

So, this is the kind of the unwritten idea of how sex and sexuality is supposed to play out in our culture and has a lot of really bad ramifications. Many of which feminists have long discussed. So, one is if women are the objects who are pursued, they're not seen as having sexual agency or desires of our own, right. So that's a really big thing. If a woman does try to assert herself, instead of viewing her as legitimately acting on her own desires, she is seen as opening herself up to be sexualized by other people, right. So, if a woman does try to make the first move, people will call her easy, right. Which means that she makes it easy for other people to get what they want from her. Which is a really horrible idea and this kind of opens the door to a lot of slut-shaming and a lot of assumptions behind that.  

So those are some of the aspects that are really bad and also makes it really hard for us to recognize that in the US statistics show that 25% of all boys and men experience sexual violence at some point in their lives. Which is an astonishing number when you think about how little we talk about that. And not only do we not talk about that much, often we talk about it as a joke, right. So, you see, any time there is a news story about an adult woman and adolescent or teenage boy, instead of discussing it as statutory rape people will make jokes about “Oh, well, he was lucky. He wasn't actually raped” because it's like really hard for us with the predator/prey mindset. It's almost as if we don't have the language or framework to really seriously discuss these discrepancies.  

Abeni: So, one of the things that you brought up just now is that a lot of these mindsets seem incredibly pervasive, most of us don't have to be taught them, we're just enculturated into them, via our society. And part of the rationale for that, for a lot of people, is that they are human nature or evolutionary or normal or natural. You're a biologist. So how do you respond to the idea when people point to things like parental investment theory or when they point to evidence that shows that these types of mindsets or these types of behaviors are natural?  

Julia: Yeah, I mean, so when I, when I discuss this towards the end of the book, my book is mostly not a biology book even though I am a biologist but at the end I kind of bring up this idea of parental investment theory. I think everyone is probably familiar with it even if you don't know what that means, but that it's this idea that since men make sperm and sperm is very resource-inexpensive and men make a lot of sperm, biologically men's interests is to like spread all their sperm all over the place as in as much as possible.  

Whereas, for females of the species, I should say that these ideas should be like for all sets of species, and not just for human beings. But in the case of females, since eggs are more resource-heavy, especially when you add pregnancy into that, it's in females like they're biologically driven to be very picky. Charles Darwin, I think, used the word coy. People talk about how women are coy, and men are eager. I think it's kind of the language he used and so they want to be kind of very selective and just want to find, you know, the person, the man with the right genes, which people talk about that. But without really much consideration of what these genes might be or so anyway…so this idea is out there and there's some evidence for it, but there's lots of exceptions to the role and particularly once you start talking about human beings, it becomes particularly strange in that we have all these sexual meanings and really obvious social regulations.  

So, if you are a woman who kind of wants to have a lot of sex, people will stigmatize you for that, right? Or if you are a queer person who doesn't want to have like you know procreative sex with someone of the other sex you want, to kind of have sex, you know, with a same sex partner that like, that's not even really in consideration. So, these are all like exceptions that aren't really explained by this. I think also just on a human being level. I don't think most people, most women, I know when they have sexual desires or have an interest in like having sex with someone, let’s just stick with the in this case, a man, right. There's not usually a lot of talk about like oh the good genes, right? [laughs] Even though men are supposed to want to like have sex really promiscuously with anyone they can, in real life actually, a lot of men are very selective about who they have sex with.  

So, it's just these ideas don't really play out in our lives and so while I don't discount that there could be some role there, I think it particularly when you're talking about human beings where we have all these social norms and these roles wer’e supposed to play, right. The idea of like the feminine woman and the masc man, these are roles that have all these different expectations that we need to follow. Once you start coloring outside of the lines, you will very easily be shamed for that. Or ostracized for that. So, I don't doubt that biology is at work and as someone who physically transitioned, who went on hormones. I would say that hormones do very real things, very real biological things, but the focus of my book is on how we perceive and interpret sex, gender, and sexuality. I think a lot of the way that we interpret the world is more based on these mindsets and certain social meanings that we've just been enculturated to buy into often without giving them much thought.  

Abeni: One of the things that you just brought up is stigma and you know, the ways that we behave generally it seems to me like that stigma is related to whether or not people's behavior aligns with those mindsets that you were discussing. Like, if you're a masc like you said, if you're a masculine man, if you're a man who fulfills the predator kind of stereotype in terms of how you do sex, if the objects of your desire are legitimate their legitimated by our society, our system, then you're good to go.  

Then if you deviate from that script, then you face policing, shame, and stigma. I'm really curious to hear- I was really interested in the way that you have articulated stigma or the concept of it in the book, that one of the ways you discuss it is…are you talking about how it functions almost like a contagion or like an infectious disease.  If someone is stigmatized then by association with our contact with them, you can be stigmatized by association which can stick to certain people, but it doesn't stick to other people. Can you talk a little bit about stigma?  How do you see that functioning with respect to the sexualization that you discuss throughout the book? 

Julia: Sure. Yeah, when I first started writing the book, and my outline of the book very much coincides with how the book turned out. Except for the one thing that kind of surprised me, as I went along stigma became more and more, an important part of it. I think most of us are familiar with stigma in terms of shame. Like, if you know, we feel for instance, in my case, I grew up feeling personal shame about being transgender, being queer and you know, most marginalized groups are stigmatized in various ways or to varying extents. So, there's that aspect of it.  

But I found that stigma is really built into how we're socialized to think about sex and particularly the predator/prey mindset. It's built into that, I’ll explain in a second why that is, and I think it explains why sex and sexuality are such taboo aspects of our culture. So, for instance, one aspect of predator/prey is that women are seen as having or being sex. Whereas men are not considered to be sex. They are people who take sex or pursue sex, right? Which is why in most cases or in a lot of like canonical cases, men don't really face sexualization that much. Whereas, with since women are sex, and we see sex as bad, we see sex itself as like stigmatized, and this is why like these ideas that women are supposed to cover up their sex. If too much of their sex is revealed whether that's rumors about them sleeping around or whether that's like we see in the case of like revenge porn etc. Then there's stigma associated with that. And this idea of sex and stigma being associated is also very, very in sexual minority. So, if you are, you know, a sex worker, or if you have a sexually transmitted disease, or if you're simply gay, there's often stigma attached to it and that stigma is viewed as like permanent like you’re kind of like permanently affected by that. So even if you, you quit doing sex work and get your STD cured and or you, you stop having same-sex relationships, people still view you as like permanently marked by that. And it was as I was working on that is where I got to notice not only that stigma is playing a big role, but also in reading about stigma there's a lot of research about how stigma is viewed as a type of contagion.  

So, this is like a magical sort of thinking, meaning It's not like the germ/disease model that we have that's based on science. This is like magical thinking that something that we view, if it comes into contact with something else that it like permanently corrupts or contaminates that other thing and you can see this come up all the time and the way that like, you know, women are pure when they're virgins, but then as soon as they have sex, people will describe them as being used or ruined by the event. 

We can see this a lot right now in this world where there's a lot of anti-LGBTQ2+ activism and politics out there and the language that supposedly adult LGBTQ2+ people are like corrupting children, the way in which the idea of grooming, which gets used by these kind of right wing people in a way that's very different from kind of useful ways of talking about grooming with regards to preventing child sexual abuse. They use it in this way that just kind of means that like, you know, in their eyes, queer people are just like filled with stigma and anything we touch, like even just seeing us walking down the street holding hands, or even a pride flag in a classroom has like this magical ability to corrupt children and their minds.  

Abeni: Yeah, like just knowing that we exist is going to infect children.  

Julia: Yeah, exactly.  

Abeni: With our cooties, essentially.  

Julia: Yes, exactly, and then one last way in which that ties into the book, I talk about the fetish mindset, which I call it, which is this idea that some people in our society are deemed undesirable. So, this happens to a lot of marginalized groups, I use the example of me being trans, a lot of people will assume that I'm undesirable, even though they also assume that I'm very hypersexual. So, in their minds, I'm having lots of sex, but nobody wants to have sex with me, which I've never really understood how they square that in their minds. But anyway, if you're seen as undesirable, then if someone does find you attractive, people call that a fetish.  

I described the many reasons why this is kind of bad pathological language and how it's wrong in many ways. But sometimes when you're viewed as undesirable, people get disgusted, thinking about having sex with you and actually contagion the idea of contagion. The idea of stigma is very closely associated with feelings of disgust. And in reading papers that kind of connected all these dots for me, it was really helpful for me to kind of connect the stigma of like, not just someone having sex with me because I'm queer and them being contaminated by that, but also other people's senses of disgust about the idea of having sex with the trans person or some other marginalized group that they have been taught is supposedly undesirable. So yeah, it ended up being a very central part of the book, in ways that I couldn't have imagined when I first started working on it.  

Abeni: It seems one of the things that you discuss is how you were just saying that some people or some things or objects are considered legitimate objects of desire and others are considered illegitimate objects of desire. You see this play, or you describe- or you discuss in the book how this plays out across all different axes, intersectional axes of identity or what category, right? They'd like whether it's people of a certain size or people with certain disabilities, or people of a certain race that is considered not a legitimate object of desire. So, there's got to be something suspect about that desire. So that then means that that desire is stigmatized, is that kind of what you're describing, right?  

Julia: Yeah, definitely. That's it, and the idea that for instance, someone who is, so groups such as I mentioned trans people, but people with disabilities and fat people have described very similar, very similar experiences of people attracted to them being called like having a fetish, right. Because supposedly no one should find them attractive, but we don't call people who are attracted to cisgender people or thin people or able-bodied people. We don't say that people have like able-bodied fetishes even if they only date people who are able-bodied, right. So, there's an obvious asymmetry to the way these things get used. [Abeni: Mhm.] And then I also describe how sometimes for some groups if the stigma goes down a little bit and it becomes more acceptable for people to be attracted to you, then it kind of plays into what has often been called as exoticization of the other, which is when people like they find marginalized groups fascinating and exotic, and this plays out a lot and this also gets called fetishization, right.  

So, people will talk about men who have like, you know, Asian fetishes right. they can play out in somewhat different ways for different groups. I want to make clear as I do in the book that because a lot of these same dynamics are happening for different marginalized groups, I'm not insinuating that we all experience the exact same thing, because we don't. There are very different histories and different stereotypes, etc. associate with each group, but they're definitely these ways in which people of color are often viewed as exotic in ways that are different from but also sort of mirror the ways in which, you know, like, trans people are seen as exotic. And so a lot of this I think is related to ideas of stigma and also the idea that certain people are marked and seem remarkable to us in ways that people who are considered the norm are viewed as unmarked.  

Abeni: I was actually going to ask you about that, you talk in the book about markedness. Could you say a little bit more about what you mean by that and how that operates?  

Julia: Sure. Yeah. I think stigma and markedness are closely associated in a way that I'll explain in a second. But um, and the idea of markedness, or in the book, I refer to as the unmarked/marked mindset is, it's not something I invented. It’s something that has long been discussed particularly in sociology and other humanities where whatever we consider to be normal and this will differ from person to person, whatever you we consider to be normal or take for granted is viewed as unmarked right. Whereas if something strikes us as different or is unusual or atypical, it will be marked in our eyes, and we tend to pay things or people that are marked way more attention and way more scrutiny. 

So, in the case of marginalized groups, marginalized groups are generally marked compared to the unmarked dominant majority group. And it's not necessarily a matter of one group being more populous and the other group being a minority because women are marked relative to men in our culture, right. So, one example is that in our culture, you know, if something is specific to women, we put the word woman on it, right. So, it becomes like, you know, women's reproductive health, but we don't really talk about men's reproductive health, or we talk about women's literature or chick flicks, right. Whereas other movies are just assumed to be for men, right? It's the way in which you become the default.  

And so, groups or individuals who are marked tend to face undue scrutiny and attention and this comes into play, I argue a lot of with regards to street harassment, this comes into play and it's the idea that when you're marked because people view you as like screaming for attention, they assume that like you're asking for whatever attention you get and that gets twisted in a lot of bad ways with regards to sexual harassment. Then I would say that stigma the way that I describe it in the book, is that stigma tends to impact marked groups. So not all marked groups are stigmatized, so like one example would be, if you’re a celebrity you're marked, you’re seen as special and there's all these horrible ways that we treat celebrities where we think that they're screaming out for attention. We assume that it's okay to like to interrupt their day, etc. But they're not stigmatized. They're viewed as marked in a way that they’re seen as special, right. So not all marked people are stigmatized but usually if stigma is involved it impacts marked groups, particularly. 

Abeni: It seems like one of the questions that I was considering or thinking about, was the way that markedness, I guess plays out in that and one of the ways that it plays out in sexualization, is that what you were discussing that kind of sex-shaming. That primarily impacts women. Right. Like, that if a woman has sex. She is marked for life. You know, I remember when I was a young person, I got the analogy from my church leaders that like every time you have sex or you're like a flower and every time you have sex there's a you know a petal ripped off of it and soon enough you'll just be an empty stem and who would want to marry that or whatever. It was primarily directed at women, right? When a man can have as much sex as they want. So, the same act and this is kind of goes back to what you were describing that this is part of the opposites mindset, the filing cabinet mindset that depending on which category you’re in, the same act has a different meaning. And when it comes to sexualization that that's one of the primary ways that operates is there’s, I guess, you know, like you said, a double standard that you do something. It means one thing, but if you do something, it means something else, and there's an expectation of how you're supposed to move through the world, with respect to those kind of meanings. You talk in the book about your kind of framework for thinking about this is, is a sexual elements or sexual meanings kind of framework or mindset for thinking about- it kind of wraps all of this up into a framework. Can you describe a little bit about that? The sexual elements and meanings framework? 

Julia: Sure, yeah. Just before I do that, I'll just mention something that coincides with what you're talking about. A lot of times when people are marked, we pay them more attention and more scrutiny and a lot of times- and also because we think that people who are marked must be doing it for some reason, they're screaming out for attention, they're inviting our attention, we assume that there are motives a lot of times. And so, because of that, a lot of times people who are marked often have sexual motives projected onto them or aspects about their bodies, or their behaviors, that are not any more sexual than anyone else's, are seen as excessively sexual, and I talk about how that plays out particularly for a lot of different marginalized groups and especially for groups that are multiply marginalized who are seen as especially conspicuous or etc. So, it plays out in all sorts of ways, with regards to that.  

With regards to the sexual elements and meanings framework that was a way for me to explain kind of aspects of how we see…okay. There's sexual diversity in that all of us have somewhat different sexual palates. Much like we have different taste palates, right. I make this analogy quite a bit because I think taste, and sex have obvious common things in that, you know, like being able to taste food is important for sustenance and sex is important for reproduction, but mostly in our culture when we think about food or sex, we think more about it in terms of pleasure.  

And so, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of the ways in which sexologists and other people, you know, view sex tends to be in very, pathology pathological ways of there's normal sex and then there's weird sex which are often called, I already said the word fetishes. But like the word paraphilia is often used to just assume that certain types of sex are wrong. Like if you had sex with me, like there's a paraphilia word to describe that that somebody invented, right? I think it's more important to realize that there are certain sexual meanings there are certain sexual elements that are things that maybe aren't the person we’re attracted to, but also serve as kind of like turn-ons to us.  

It's a way to talk about these meanings, A- we kind of inherit a set of meanings from our culture and a lot of people buy into those but sometimes we deviate from those, and deviate has strong negative connotations because of the idea of sexual deviation. So, let me say we vary from those often, right? Then also, sometimes we recognize that there are certain hierarchies in our culture such as predator/prey. But there are other hierarchies that may inform our sexualities or you know, like if you are, if you're a woman in our culture you might find it erotic, the idea of a man who like, well, you wouldn't want at all for a man to like to engage in sexual violence without your consent, the idea of kind of romanticized idea of like the perfect, like ideal sexual aggressor, man, like this is the Sean Connery and James Bond movies or whatever action hero who you know there's a way that you can have a kind of romanticized or eroticized idea of like that as a partner or a situation that you wouldn't necessarily want to have in real life. So, once we realize these different meanings and that they can vary from person to person and that again as long as we're not engaging in these ideas, non-consensually, again I talk about this a lot with regards to sexual fantasies so basically just a way to describe sexual diversity and a way that is ethically sexual and that it's not non-consensually involving others, but also understands that there is a lot of sexual diversity out there that stems from us projecting different meanings onto different people and different other aspects, adjacent aspects. 

Abeni: Well, I feel like the food analogy is so apt with regards to that idea of sexual meanings being projected onto different behaviors or different actions around diversity, right? Because you talk about in the book how very few of us or the vast majority of cases. We don't stigmatize someone having a different taste in food than us. We might be interested or curious or you know, some people do try to police other people's taste in food. A lot of us probably or, especially those of us who are maybe immigrants who experienced that in the lunchroom as a kid. But generally speaking, it doesn't happen but you kind of use that analogy to talk about all the wide variety of ways that people do sexuality. We could view them as just as benign as the many varied ways that people have taste in food and we even talk about it in the same way like you said, like we say, what's your taste in men or women, right? We could view it as just as benign but instead we project a bunch of meanings and assumptions onto people’s different tastes in sex and that's not necessarily inherent. It's not true, it's just arbitrary and created in most cases. Obviously, there are like you said, cases of non-consensuality, it's different but in most cases we could decide not to do that, decide not to project negative meanings on to certain consensual acts of sex.  

Julia: Yeah, I mean, when I talk about meanings with regards to food, it's like if you think about food like it's just it's not as simple as oh, there's food I find tasty food that I dislike often, like different foods mean different things to you, right? So, if I were to say, you know, oh, I had champagne and caviar last night for dinner, you might say, oh, what were you celebrating right? Or, you know, you could have something like a communion wafer, right. That is imbued with all sorts of meanings that go well beyond the actual literal piece of food, right? And we do this with a lot of things, you know, there could be like a meal, that's very special to you because you used to have it as a kid or from the town you grew up in, all sorts of things.  

So, recognizing that some of your experiences with meanings and food will be different. Recognizing that different meanings about like, you know, what you find attractive or in people things along those lines, then you can more easily recognize that oh, well, you could appreciate a different type of person than me or find something erotic that I don't find erotic and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. Right. It's like getting away from the idea that solitary consensual sexuality that it's not it doesn't inherently fall into good and bad, right and wrong categories.  

I also talk a lot in the book about as a way to kind of moderate between the sex-positive, sex-negative stances which I definitely fall way more to the sex positive side of those two. But talking about kind of having ambivalent views about sex and sexuality, which I think is also important like recognizing that we can have mixed feelings about certain things. So, there might be something that makes us feel somewhat negative, but also, we might be somewhat attracted to it, right. I think that's good to help us make sense to work through kind of what it is that we're experiencing, what we want and what we don't want, these sorts of conversations that we don't really have a whole lot in our culture where there's just this assumption that this is how you're supposed to do it, and anything that deviates is wrong.  

Abeni: Yeah, for sure, definitely. One of the things that comes up for me with thinking that is that it seems like the primary difference, that like we don't want to put sex into this is good or this is legitimate, or this is acceptable, but the kind of line is around consent. And to me, it seems like when I was reading your book that the primary difference between sexuality and sexualization is consent. That if we were to freely choose to engage in, let's say a predator/prey dynamic with our partner because maybe that's a BDSM scene we’re doing, or maybe that's just I'm a bottom and she's a top or whatever or whatever. That would be fine, right? If it's freely, totally consensual. If those are like choices that we make with complete infinite power and agency to choose whatever we want, the problem is the compulsory nature of the script that you described but you also talked a little bit in the book about the limits of consent as a principal. So how doesn't consent really get at the heart of the issue? 

Julia: Yeah, I think that there has been a focus because we live in a world where most people don't have the experience of having in-depth sex education or going to like classes or whatever, where there's discussions of sexual diversity, because we lack that a lot of people grow up, particularly, I mean, I grew up in this world where you just assume that predator/prey is how it works. Men are like this, women are like this and this is how it's supposed to happen. And the predator-prey script it's like really pretty much all mapped out, right? Like what is supposed to happen.  

And consent is really crucial, and the feminists focus on consent initially like, like it used to be when I was growing up. People say no means, no, right, which is a way to stress that if a woman says no then she's not consenting and then it's not consensual, that's bad, right. Which is something people had to be told because part of the sexual aggressor male script is that he's supposed to keep pushing and pushing further and further. Until she acquiesces, right.  

So then more recently there's been the affirmative consent that you know the woman should enthusiastically consent, which is good like both parties should be enthusiastic about what they're going to do, right? So I'm all for consent is crucial and enthusiastic consent is really good, but if there's no discussion about the fact that there are these built-in roles and rules, the script that everyone's supposed to follow…then if you're only talking about consent, then it's still kind of going to be by default on a predator/prey framework, right?  

This is something as a queer woman, like in my experiences dating other LGBTQIA+ people that there is often discussions about what it is that you want, what are your boundaries. I’m not saying that absolutely every instance of like queer sex is perfectly negotiated and communicated. But for a lot of us it's not really clear who's in what role and it's not necessarily clear that like, oh well, I'm a woman. So, I must want this or, you know, they're a man. So, they must want that, you know, especially if you know, the person you're dating is non-binary or if they just are diverse gender or sexually in other ways. Um, so they're almost has to be some communication and discussion about boundaries and likes and dislikes and that is something I'm very used to now, that when I was growing up there was like none of that. So, if you don't have those discussions, then consent in and of itself is going to fall short. It's crucial but it's not a panacea on its own. 

Abeni: It’s like, I guess if we focus too much on consent, it's kind of like there's the script and you can consent or not to the script. But that doesn't necessarily challenge the primacy of the script itself kind of, right? 

Julia: Yeah, exactly and like, part of the whole script, the predator/prey script is that by definition, certain things are in the book I describe it as off the menu. Which means you have to ask for it. So, people might do that if they want something like that, that's a little bit different from kind of sex that leads up to like, man, on top woman on bottom, missionary position penetration sex, like outside of that, then there might be some discussions about, oh, would you be interested in this or that? But usually, there's only a couple things that are considered okay to ask for, it doesn't take too much to- to reach a point where what you're asking for is going to be considered weird or sick or perverted, right?  

Abeni: Yeah. Well, I'm realizing we're getting close to the end of time. What I wanted to do is talk a bit more about towards the end of the book, you get into like, well, what do we do? All right. So how do we address this issue we've just spent the last 45 minutes or so exploring and describing. You identify essentially like three main ways that we can move toward more ethical sexuality. The first one is rejecting non-consensuality. Which is, I guess, essentially like being which I wonder if I can kind of encapsulate in a short phrase or something like that. But so much of how we view sex and sexuality is by projecting meanings or ideas or assumptions on to people, and how they should, or shouldn't behave sexually and that denies their humanity and agency, because it's not consensual. We tell people how they should be, instead of having people be free to do whatever. Is that close to-? My question I guess it is like how do we reject non-consensualality? 

Julia: Sure. Yeah, when I discuss that, I definitely make a point of moving beyond just like, obviously, we should reject non-consensuality meaning if someone doesn't consent to something, then it shouldn't happen, right? That is clear. I think most people understand that, but I kind of extended to, there's this idea that I borrow, and I discuss earlier in the book, from feminist philosopher named Ann Cahill called derivatization, and that may sound like a li- I think it sounds confusing at first, but most people are familiar with the term objectification. And so, imagine taking objectification, removing the word object, and putting in the word derivative just a derivatization. And she uses this, I think in really useful ways to first, get over some bad ideas, they're kind of built into the idea of objectification specifically. There can be positive ways in which you can feel objectified by your partner consensually, right. There are other philosophical issues of objectification, but derivatization uses it to mean when we view somebody else as a derivative of our own desires and wants and needs.  

So, it's really useful for talking about the idea of like fetishization, like one issue with people being attracted to me as a trans woman, not all people, but there are subsets of people who are attracted to me as a trans women but only because they project these ideas about what a trans woman is, that kind of completely conflict with my own understanding of myself. So, I think it's really important for us to not have derivatize people. So, I put that under reject non-consensuality. So, we should reject the idea of pursuing sex with people based on the idea that they are going to be the thing that we desire without our regard to their own agency, autonomy, and desires. So yeah, that's an important part of rejecting non-consensuality.  

Abeni: Totally. One of the second ways that you talk about trying to move toward ethical sexuality is deconstructing the good sex versus bad sex, binary, which I think we talked about a little bit, but I want to ask you about the final ways that you argue that we should self-examine our own sexual desires. And basically to like try to do some introspection to determine to what degree did my own sexual desires, align with that script or with, you know, maybe oppressive dynamics within our culture or maybe with, you know, misogynist beliefs or with racist beliefs, you know, etcetera, we should be just critical about ourselves because yes, some of it is authentic, but our sexualities are impacted by our enculturation, right?  

So, my question about that is like, how far should we go? Like, what does it look like to self-examine your sexual desires. For example, like we were just talking about someone if someone is attracted to trans women it feels different when they're attracted to you, and you are a trans woman versus when they're attracted to you because you're a trans woman. But the other flipside to that too is when people are not attracted to someone because they're trans women. I guess my question is like, what if you self-examine your desires and you find that they potentially authentically conform to an oppressive social norm or something like that. How far can we go in examining our own desires and is it necessarily problematic if we find that they, like I said, conform to one of the mindsets from what we talked about at the beginning or if they conform to some standard that if it were compulsory, it would be problematic. But if it feels more authentic than it, it’s tricky.  

Julia: Yeah. Um like I think a quintessential example of this is, and I've read a lot of feminists who are like sex positive feminists, who are women, who tend to, who are submissive, sexually submissive and particularly in cases, obviously not all sexually submissive women are attracted to men, but those who are then, there's this dynamic of ‘What does it mean that I'm just, I'm a feminist?’ ‘I'm sex, positive’. I think women should have agency, but what does it mean? that I'm in a desire to be submissive to a man in a sexual context. That is, of course, consensual. But nevertheless, might seem to conflict with, you know, or might seem to play into certain hierarchies that, you know, are bad and there are a lot of examples of this and that's like a common one that there's a lot of people who have written about it. So, I think it's a useful one to think about, I think that it's definitely quite possible for people to be ethically sexual even if aspects of their sexuality seems to conform to certain hierarchies or traditional norms as long as you’re critical about it, as long as you're not like projecting that on to other people and assuming other people should also live up to that. I think it can definitely be done ethically.  

In fact, I've been very much influenced by reading people kind of feminists who have worked through these issues for themselves. But obviously predator/prey isn't the only hierarchy you mentioned, you know, like, you know, there's racism, there's issues about people having differences within a relationship. People can have completely different economic power. There could be an economic power disparity or there could be, you know, relationships where one partner is older than the other, one partner more able-bodied then the other one is disabled, and kind of, I think there's of us who've been in relationships. Any of those relationships knows that there's a lot of kind of working through that and not wanting, wanting to be both mutually supportive loving of one, another caring for one another's needs, but at the same time, recognizing ways in which hierarchies or disparities can kind of crop up and not letting those shape your experience together. And particularly, when I was talking to the self-examining desires, mostly because we want to get away from policing, other people's desires, again with the exception of people who are engaging in non-consensual sexual activities aside from that, we shouldn't go around policing other people because of all the reasons that I've talked about.  

But yeah, so self-examining is hard, you know, you can think about an analogy would be self- examining any aspect of your life, you know, like why, you know, what does it mean that, you know, I'm doing this job or I live my life in this particular way, we often contemplate our aspects of our life and decide whether what we're doing is ethical or not. I think sometimes because sexuality and particularly with regards to sexual minorities. There's this idea that oh well, you know, you're born that way, or we don't get to choose our sexualities which there is some truth to that for some people in certain cases. But sometimes that gets used as a blanket so that people refuse to do any critical thinking about their sexuality. I think it's good to do critical thinking, in fact, it's necessary if you want to live in a world where we're ethical but we're not having to engage in a lot of policing of solitary and consensual sexual experiences.  

Abeni: I think that I guess one way to think about that is that introspection is valuable no matter where we land at the end of it, right? Like, even if we find out like, okay, well, I'm a woman who is heterosexual and I enjoy being submissive or I'm attracted to a very assertive and powerful man, and that's just what I've been to, or like I have a friend who's really into men who have money and they've done a lot of thinking about that and that's where they've landed I guess. But the important thing is that you do the work to actually think deeply about and interrogate that and if you land somewhere that you're able to be comfortable with, that's fine.  

I have one final question for you though, which is like we can do a lot of that work, right? Internally, we can do this interrogation of our own desires. We can change our thinking patterns and reject the mindsets, reject good versus bad sex, we can reject non-consensualality. But it's something that you get into in the book is that that's going to have impact in our own lives. But really so much of how sexualization functions is in a larger society and its people in power who and it's in institutions and it's part of the ideology of our culture and a lot of the folks who have maybe harmful attitudes about sex or who believe really deeply in the mindsets and want to impose them on others, they will never. They might not probably read this book or be interested in doing that type of introspection, is there a way that we can move the culture forward in a larger way? Is there something we can do about the bigger picture other than in addition to doing the internal work?  

Julia: Sure, yeah. That's a difficult question. and yeah, I talk about this in the last chapter. I think one thing is part of the reason why I put all these out there and I called the mindsets, and I gave them names is that a lot of times if you know about a particular pattern of thinking that you can recognize it. So, like one example would be confirmation bias or the gambler's fallacy, which idea is something that a lot of us have heard of and once you know about it, it can make you question your thinking right? So, I would hope that as these mindsets get more well-known that people will absorb them in our culture through osmosis and recognize them as kind of biased ways of looking at the world and hopefully try to move beyond them.  

But beside that, I do think there are things that we can do with regards to de-stigmatizing sex and sexuality and particularly with regards to groups who are marginalized. But then also like one thing I talked about, you know, there's all these examples of people sexualizing other people and part of the power of sexualizing someone is that it kind of knocks them down a peg, whether you call someone, you know, like a queer phobic slur, you call them a slut, or you call them a pervert. Like, all these things they affect people, but if you turn that around and you make sex sexualizing other people the bad thing if people like kind of paid a price for sexualizing other people, then that could create a society where there's less sexualization, which does happen to some degree. Like, you know, like a lot of people now know, if you call someone a slut, you're going to get push back about being sexist, right?  

But it usually only happens in certain sectors, and I think overall, if we all work to destigmatize, sex and sexuality and we work to create a world where those kind of acts across the board, where people recognize, how all these forms of sexualization are interconnected and unhealthy and bad for us as a culture and work to move beyond that. We could hopefully move to a place where there's at least if sexualization is not completely eliminated, at least reduced and at least living in a world where there's more accepting of sexual difference and where there's in a world where there's less sexual violence. So, again, I mean, these are as with any big questions often, it's kind of hard to see how we get there from here, but I definitely think there are some steps that we can take towards that ultimate goal and there's so much. 

Abeni: And there so much, like I think about the work of adrienne maree brown and like she talks about like fractals and community and how like, well maybe we'll just do it ourselves or with our social networks but then maybe they'll be doing that work with their networks and their and it eventually kind of can ripple out until it becomes the norm and then like you're saying like the people who are sexualizing are the ones actually getting policed instead of the people who are being sexualized.  

Julia: Yeah.  

Abeni: Well, thank you so much for this lovely conversation. I want to say thank you so much Julia for having this conversation with me and I also want to say thank you so much for writing this excellent book.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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