Of course K has everyone in a fury, for and against, and we’re seeing the same old hysteria surface. A vote for Prop K, according to its opponents, is a vote for slavery. The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, has been particularly vocal about this equation.

The idea that prostitution is innately connected to enslavement and trafficking has a long and shameful history. It’s not something that Melissa Farley merely pulled out of her ass, no matter where the rest of her research may come from. Reason Magazine has a really interesting review of Sin in the Second City, a history of prostitution in Chicago by Karen Abbot, which sheds some light on how the myth of “white slavery” has developed over the past century, and how it’s been used by both activists and the law to control the discussion of sex work as work:

The attempt to portray prostitutes as professionals never made much headway against the tendency to view them as victims. At the beginning of Sin in the Second City, Abbott describes an event in 1887 that forever changed the American public’s perception of sex workers. Authorities raided a Michigan lumber camp, finding nine women working as prostitutes. Eight accepted their prison sentences, but the ninth woman protested that she was tortured and forced into sex slavery. The lumberyard proprietors claimed the women were well aware of what they were hired to do;”the job description,” Abbott notes, “made no mention of cutting trees.” But the public was so moved by the woman’s story that she was pardoned and released from jail.

It was 20 years before another case of “white slavery” was reported in a Midwestern newspaper. But in the meantime, rumors of girls who were “trafficked” into sex slavery began to circulate. In 1899 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union missionary Charlton Edholm reported, “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks at this time, but little white girls — thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age — and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our Communion tables.” Perhaps they found themselves in a “false employment snare,” in which a young rural girl answered a city want ad and found herself locked in a brothel, her clothes held for ransom. Or maybe a gentleman from the big city, after plying her with drinks or drugs, deflowered her and sold her to a pimp.

Around the same time, anti-prostitution evangelical groups revised their platforms. Victorian society previously had reviled prostitutes as lost women who reduced men to animals. The rhetorical shift conveniently removed the prostitute’s responsibility for her actions.

The review is well worth a read, especially today. Looking forward on Election Day is great, but it’s even more ideal if you can be like the Roman god Janus, looking forward and back at the same time.

From a sex-positive viewpoint, the immediate impulse is to say unambiguously, “NO!” The opposite answer has always been the hallmark of the puritans who police desire, and has destroyed more lives than can be counted. The idea that we have a right to our own desires as long as they either stay in our own heads or are acted out with consenting adults is the very core of the struggles for queer rights, for the acknowledgment of transgenderism, for the legitimacy of BDSM, and for the free manufacture and sale of pornography and sex toys of all kinds. It defines the difference between the people who see sexuality as normal and natural and those who see it as a dark, animal part of ourselves that we must transcend.

But I think that for most of us, no matter how expertly pervy and kinky and open-minded we are, the answer becomes more ambiguous once you start delving into particulars. For instance:

• Racism: Race play is one of those issues that even hardcore kinksters have trouble agreeing on. What would your reaction be if, for instance, a white man told you that he wanted to get a black woman to be his “nigger bitch”? If a white woman wanted to get a black man to play “Mandingo” with her? (Alternet article on race play here.)
• Pedophilia: There are acceptable versions of underage fantasies, such as dressing up in schoolgirl/boy outfits, cheerleader uniforms, etc. These variations on the theme are so common as to be seen as harmless and playfully naughty. But what if you knew that someone was fantasizing about having sex with actual children? Is the fantasy still okay? Is it different if they’re fantasizing about imaginary children as opposed to specific, real-life children? Does the fantasy become less acceptable according to the degree of violence that it includes? Because of the very real vulnerability of children to exploitation, this is probably the area where people have the most intense reaction to fantasies, whether they’re acted on or not. Earlier this year, Karen Fletcher pleaded guilty to obscenity charges based on the content of her website, “Red Rose Stories,” which featured erotic stories about the rape and torture of children. She was prosecuted entirely on the basis of the text of the stories, which described imaginary acts and people.
• Rape: What if someone tells you that they fantasize about rape? Do you feel different if their fantasy is to be raped rather than to rape? Is there a difference if the person is a man or a woman? Is it different if the fantasy takes place in an imaginary setting, such as a princess kidnapped by an evil prince, as opposed to a fantasy that re-enacts modern realities? Blogger Tess Danesi wrote a piece for Time Out New York’s 2007 Sex Issue about acting out a rape fantasy with a partner called, bluntly enough, “I Want to… Be Raped.” The description was raw, and violent, and I know Tess well enough to know that she does not, in the literal sense, want to be raped. I know that she’s an intelligent woman with a solid grasp of her own sexuality and of the difference between fantasy and reality. But as angry as I was at the people who self-righteously condemned her piece, I have to admit that reading it made me squirm uncomfortably.
• Snuff: The bête noir of all anti-porn arguments. The urban legend of “snuff films,” which purportedly show actual people being murdered onscreen, persists even though it has been repeatedly and definitively debunked. The most important thing to say before exploring this particular fantasy is that snuff films DO NOT EXIST. They’re a myth, and rank on the crazy scale with eyewitness reports of the Loch Ness Monster, theories of the Jew/Liberal Media, little green men who are beaming messages into your skull, and Ayn Rand. With that in mind, the fantasy does exist. The most socially acceptable version of snuff fantasies is the vampire myth. Since the publication of Dracula in 1896, the vampire has become one of the most persistently powerful icons that braids both our sexual fears and desires into one. We’re comfortable with the vampire’s fusion of sex and death because it’s an inherently fantastic, unreal being, and in most incarnations, pretty corny. But what about more realistic fantasies that incorporate sex and murder? How comfortable do you feel with someone who tells you that they fantasize about slitting a partner’s throat at climax, or having it done to them? What if someone’s fantasies include torturing someone to death, or cannibalizing a partner?

I doubt many people can read through all of those potential fantasies without flinching, and I’m sure that people can expand the list. What do you think? What fantasies cause your moral sense to rebel, and what factors would make your response change? For instance, is your response to a pedophilia scene different depending on whether it’s merely shared among friends, written as a story, put on video, electronically simulated in Second Life, or played out in a dungeon? Does it matter whether the participants are male or female? Does it matter whether it’s same-sex or different?

• First of all, Dacia tried last month to open an account at Citibank for her business, Waking Vixen Productions. After filling out the preliminary paperwork, she received a voicemail delicately informing her that her line of business made them unable to take her account.
• Then, early this month, she got a similar notice from iTunes, notifying her that her podcast, Live Girl Review, could no longer be included in their directory. ITunes was less direct than Citibank, saying only that podcasts could be excluded “for a variety of reasons.” On checking out their podcast spec sheet, she found “strong prevalence of sexual content”  included among the possible reasons that Apple can kick you to the curb.
• And just last week, Google yanked her Google Checkout account, barely twenty-four hours after she’d put her new short film The Love Machine up for sale. According to the e-mail Google sent Dacia, “the products or services [she's] selling on [her] website are considered ‘Restricted’ per our policy- Adult goods and services.” 

The last one really has to sting, because it’s as stupid as it is nebulous. The letter that Google sent Dacia doesn’t tell what makes her site too smutty for them to deal with, or what she has to do to clean it up. She said to me in an e-mail “If that just means taking down sales links to the Bi Apple, that’s fine… but if it also means the Dacia’s Love Machine is adult… I’m screwed.” And of course, so is anyone else who wants to make sexuality an inherent part of public discourse, because we can’t tell what the rules are. Taken either together or separately, these three incidents show how fragile the concept of the public square has become. In 1960, press critic and journalist A.J. Liebling made the famous observation that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” That’s even more true than it was 48 years ago; although it’s theoretically easier to build and operate your own “press” — whether it’s blog software, a video camera, a copy of Photoshop, or podcasting — whatever you produce will go nowhere if the channels of distribution are blocked off, and many of those channels are privately owned. When Elizabeth and I first created this site, one of the things we had to look at very closely was the Acceptable Use Policy of each of the web hosting providers that we checked out. Most web hosts have an AUP that very specifically says “no porn”; the hitch is that you never know which hosts are going to actually enforce that, and which ones tossed it in as boilerplate that routinely gets ignored. As Dacia’s dilemma shows, there are many, many resources which seem public and open in our everyday lives, but the minute sexuality is brought up, their private ownership becomes immediately apparent.

The irony is that such policies don’t hinder the people who make the majority of the stuff that really pisses off the anti-porn crowd. Do you really think that Vivid’s income is hindered one bit by not being able to use a Google account? Does Larry Flynt lose sleep over the fact over Apple’s policies about listing adult podcasts? Not one bit. Their size and financial resources allow them to either take a small detour to distribute their goods and collect payments through other means, or just roll right over them like a big rig facing down a turtle standing in the middle of the highway. The people they inconvenience are those for whom sexual expression is personal and artistic, who are trying to create things that reflect their own lives and desires, not a corporate product.

In short, these policies preserve the status quo. They guarantee that sexuality continues to be represented within smotheringly narrow limits dominated by bleach jobs, silicone tits, and cum shots performed by actors who are seen as old news when they hit 25, and the availability of genuinely imaginative works like Love Machine and Live Girl Review shrinks that much more. For years, we’ve heard about the near-mystical virtues of a “free market,” and we keep on finding out that it’s not that free; the Internet was sold to us as an “information superhighway,” only to discover how easily toll booths and road blocks can be built, rendering it as mobile as the 405 near West Hollywood on a Friday afternoon. The smaller our public space becomes, the more restricted the channels for distribution come, the more we’re reduced to passive listeners with no voice of our own.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYTbIOIXiyU[/youtube]

Another example of chutzpah that rivals even the archetypal parricide is that of the Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn who’ve recently gotten into a snit because “scantily clad” women ride their bicycles on the bike routes along the bike paths on the streets running through the South Williamsburg area: 

“I have to admit, it’s a major issue, women passing through here in that dress code,” Simon Weisser, a member of Community Board 1 in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, told The Post.

“It bothers me, and it bothers a lot of people.”

The existing, one-way lanes are popular with North Williamsburg hipsters – many who ride in shorts or skirts….

Hasids are forbidden from looking at members of the opposite sex who aren’t fully dressed, said local activist Isaac Abraham….

The issue of dress – or lack of it – wasn’t brought up at the meeting. Weisser and the other Hasids instead complained publicly about bike lanes allegedly causing parking problems and traffic congestion.

Abraham later said another major concern is the safety of children, noting that cyclists “aren’t obeying traffic laws. Green lights and red lights are the same.”

Hasids last month complained about a sexy billboard promoting the teen drama “90210″ that could be seen from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and that featured swimwear-clad characters.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. That link is to The New York Post, which is to journalism what Sarah Palin is to foreign policy. But clashes between the Chasidic community and the hipsters who have moved into Williamsburg have been common for years, and not all the articles on this particular article have been quite so salacious. The Jerusalem Post’s article, for instance, shows that although it might not be a simple battle of the chasids vs. the hotties, the tension between conflicting sexual moralities and notions of the proper use of public space is certainly an issue.

I can’t say that I feel too much sympathy for the Chasidic Jews in this case. At the heart of most puritanism is a massive instance of chutzpah: the belief that your own moral insights are so unshakeably true, that everyone else should be held responsible to them. In this specific case, the Chasids also portray their men as so morally frail that the rest of the community needs to treat them almost as children or cripples, so that they can avoid even the slightest temptation or impure thought. That’s an old trick: it starts out pathologizing male sexuality and in a loop-the-loop of logic, winds up repressing female sexuality.

The concern for Chassid men being confronted by naked female legs pedaling through South Williamsburg rings especially hollow to me considering how many Chassidic men show up at New York sex parties and clubs. They’re so common as to be a New York archetype; almost no public party is complete without a scattering of Chassidic men with their locks pinned back watching the action. If they’re so worried about their men succumbing to temptation, that might be one of the things that they want to focus on before getting all het up about shiksas on bicycles.

(X-posted from Sex in the Public Square)

As iamcuriousblue points out, there seems to be a huge divide in how the film is presented in its press package and the tone set by the trailer and clips on the website. The press synopsis explicitly makes the film out to be one that looks at porn through a filter of calm, unbiased rationality:

Honest and nonjudgmental, the film paints both a nuanced and complex portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate aspects of human relations. At the same time, the film examines the unprecedented role that commercial pornography now occupies in U.S. popular culture. Going beyond the debate of liberal versus conservative so common in the culture, The Price of Pleasure provides a holistic understanding of pornography as it debunks common myths about the genre.

That’s a film I want to see. That’s a film that needs to be made. We urgently need to see it if we’re going to stop clawing ourselves to death over our desires. But The Price of Pleasure obviously isn’t that film. The trailer confirms every American’s worst nightmares not only about porn, but about sex itself. It’s hungry, hateful men dangling on the very edge of rape and women who are either victims or who have failed in their duty to restrain men’s sexual urges and channel them into more civilized pursuits.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ugVdNpKCw4[/youtube]

Anyone who’s seen a sizeable amount of porn and hung out with other people who like porn knows that the portraits the makers of The Price of Pleasure are hawking aren’t total fictions. There’s a lot of sleazeballs out there. But they’re not the truth, either. The picture that they’re giving is one that’s carefully framed and cropped to frighten people who haven’t seen enough porn to realize that the X-Treme stuff that’s so beloved by Dines and Jensen is a small fragment of the total picture.

Naturally, it may be ridiculous of me to be passing judgement without seeing the film as a whole. But I don’t think so. There’s some obvious philosophical slants in the fact that the trailer shows Joanna Angel asking “How to you make a woman into an object? What the hell does that mean?” followed by an abrupt cut to a film clip showing her being gagged with duct tape. The clips page virtually excludes any activists from the sex industry except for Ernest Greene, in favor of the standard anti-porn talking heads like Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, Pamela Paul, and Ariel Levy.

The juxtaposition of Joanna Angel’s interview with her movie clip is particularly disturbing to me. It reminds me of one of the most pernicious tendencies of anti-porn feminists, which is to act as enforcers against other women of a very specific vision of normative sexuality. In order for that particular part of the trailer to have any meaning at all, you have to count on the fact that the viewer will say to themselves “No normal woman would like that,” as reflexively as they would say “Water is wet.” You can see Joanna Angel one of two ways after watching those few seconds of video: as a helpless victim or as a sick, sick woman. She can be cast as either virgin or whore, with nothing between those two poles that would represent her humanity. That’s one of the most corrupt and offensive things about the anti-porn school: the barely-hidden misogyny that they direct towards women in the sex industry.

According to the web site, there are screenings planned in Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno between September and November. What I’d like to see happen is for those of us in communities where these screenings are going to take place to organize in groups to attend and ask questions that are critical of the methodology and philosophy behind the film. I don’t think that sex-poz activists should be disruptive at such an event, but neither do I think that a film that presents itself as “nuanced” and “non-judgmental” about pornography should be shown to homogenous, un-critical audiences.

(x-posted from Sex in the Public Square)

Acevedo’s treatment by the papers that Reneé links to makes me think of her as a modern-day version of Mrs. Hutchinson, the woman who is selected by chance and stoned to death by her family and friends as a sacrifice to insure prosperity for their village in Shirley Jackson’s classic story “The Lottery.” Only the analogy isn’t quite accurate. In Jackson’s story, the villagers saw the ritual murder of their neighbor as a grim duty. It was unpleasant, but had to be done for the common good. The delight that the newswriters  take in Acevedo’s life and death exhibits a deeper, uglier sadism than I’ve ever seen in any porno or dungeon. I know that I’m going to be thinking of Acevedo when this year’s International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers comes around, because the naked contempt for her death says so much about who our society considers disposable. In the end, she’s not a tragedy. Just a one-liner. In “The Lottery,” the village got flourishing crops from the annual murder of one of their own. What is it about Elizabeth Acevedo’s death that’s supposed to enrich and ennoble us?

On “Bonnie’s Blog of Crime,” there is a comment about Elizabeth from someone who signs themself only as “A Relative.” In some ways it’s also ambivalent about her life, but it’s a more humane eulogy than anything the media seems willing to grant her:

Although Elizabeth choose to live that lifestyle she did not deserve to die the way she did. I pray that who ever is responsible for her murder would get the maximum penalty. Inspite of her difficult life there was a side of her that everyone loved. She was a caring & friendly, idividual. She may have been the way she was but she still touched the heart to those that were around her.I know that she is now in a better place May she rest in peace

]]> http://literateperversions.com/blog/2008/05/13/toddler-on-the-highway-to-hell/feed/ 1 http://literateperversions.com/blog/2008/05/06/a-goodbye-to-deborah-jeane-palfrey/ http://literateperversions.com/blog/2008/05/06/a-goodbye-to-deborah-jeane-palfrey/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 23:54:32 +0000 Chris http://literateperversions.com/?p=480 Continue reading →]]> As is true of a lot of people in the sex-positive community, I’ve been thinking a lot about Deborah Jean Palfrey’s death this past week. I didn’t know her personally, and never met her in person, so I can’t speak of her death in terms of personal tragedy or grief. But grief and anger are what I’m feeling, because Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s fate could have been written onto the lives of so many women and men. And the anger comes from the fact that it has, and it will be.

The real tragedy of her death, from where I’m standing, is not anything extraordinary about her story, but how common and familiar it is, to the point of being cliché. If the story of Deborah Jean Palfrey had been laid out in a novel or play or screenplay, I would be angry at having my time wasted by a writer who was unable or unwilling to rise above cheap hackery that was old and worn out in the days of the Victorian penny dreadfuls. But Palfrey was a real person, and it makes me sick and angry to think how often the lives of people who should live peaceful, untroubled lives are forced into old patterns.

When I heard that Palfrey had hung herself, one of the first things that I thought of was the story of Ida Craddock. Craddock was a freethinker and feminist who wrote several sexual education manuals and pamphlets in the late 19th century. She was hounded and pursued for over a decade by the moralists of the day, in particular the infamous Anthony Comstock. In 1902, she was finally convicted for sending obscene materials through the mail and sentenced to five years in prison. Craddock was 45 years old at the time of her conviction and didn’t think that she could survive her sentence; the night before she was supposed to report for incarceration, she slit her wrists. Comstock showed no signs of regretting her suicide; in fact, he commonly bragged that he had driven as many as 15 people to suicide in his crusade for public morality.

One hundred and six years later, I want Ida Craddock’s story to seem quaint and old-fashioned, like an aged relic of less enlightened times. But Deborah Jean Palfrey is dead, hung from the neck by a nylon rope; her former employee, Brandy Britton, went the same way. David Vitter is still in the Senate. So it goes.

In the eye of the media, Palfrey’s death was regarded almost without a blasé fascination, as if the urge for a woman who transgressed to hang herself in her mother’s shed was as natural and unavoidable as birds migrating. And it seems unbelievable that one hundred and six years after Ida Craddock, we have to work so hard to justify not only the course that she chose to make for her life, but that we also have to fight to make others see that her death was a stupid waste, and not the inevitable end to a badly-written melodrama.

What we do, all the blogging and writing and organizing sometimes sometimes can seem futile, especially with stories like Palfrey’s. The one thing that we can be grateful for, in a somewhat grim way, is that Palfrey had to do more than merely write about sex before she was hounded and shamed into her grave. That, at least, is something that we’ve accomplished in the one hundred years since Ida Craddock opened her veins with a straight razor. But it’s not enough.

I hope this is the end of this story. I hope that whoever the successors of the people in this group are in one hundred years don’t find themselves having to mourn yet another woman who can only find solace with a razor or rope or gun or pills because she offended the guardians of morality. The one thing that gives me hope is the people on this list and in this community. If one day, the deaths of Palfrey and Britton and Craddock seem as ridiculous and wasteful as they should, it won’t be because of the slut-shaming puritans like Heart or Sam Berg or the utterly fraudulent Melissa Farley who pose as “radical” feminists; their hands firmly gripped the shovel that dug Palfrey’s grave. It won’t be because of the Christians who “love” women and queers until they’re bruised and bloody. It will be because we’re lucky enough to have a community of strong, dedicated people who speak out about their lives honestly and without shame. It will be because of Amber Rhea, who’s not only spoken out, but who organized Sex 2.0 and helped people come together and meet and talk in a place where they weren’t shamed for their lives and feellings. It will be because of Renegade Evolution, with her intensely honest anger about the hypocrisy on both left and right regarding sex. Because of Audacia Ray, who’s consistently done brilliant writing and activism and is unquestionably a force for good in this world. It will be because of Jill Brenneman, Melissa Gira, Stacy Swimme, Amanda Brooks, Lux Alptraum, and too many other people to list. In the midst of all this anger and grief, I am comforted by the fact that we have such an incredible collection of people.

Despite the slander that the pseudo radical feminists and the religious right alike spread, none of us are here to make porn cheaper and easier to get, or to turn women into just another product of capitalism. If Palfrey’s suicide says nothing else, it’s that the reason our community exists literally is a matter of life and death.

In an essay on sex writing, you wrote that you think you “…draw believable men, but do not grapple or invest in those characters the same way you do in writing women.” Why do you think this is?

Partly it’s because my relationship with women has been so full of discussion on identity and dissent around what any given sexual thing means. I can’t think about any deep discussions or arguments I’ve had about men about the meaning of various sexual acts in the same way that I’ve had them ad infinitum, with women. Often, these arguments are just in my own subconscious. I’ll talk back to things people like Gloria Steinem or Catharine MacKinnon have said while I’m doing something else, like washing dishes. Washing dishes and having arguments with Catharine MacKinnon — that’s always fun. Also, because my feminist identity is so strong and was so early developed, and because it dovetails historically with lesbian feminist identity, there is always an awareness for me that there are other ways that other women would be think about the same set of circumstances. I have to grapple with those things. I don’t have grapple with the experience when I’m writing from the perspective of men.

In terms of erotica, what you’re working with is a language that is pretty loaded. I mean, what vocabulary do you have besides “fuck” and “hot, throbbing cock”? Is it hard for you to work with those words in a way that is separated from what they’ve been loaded with?

That’s a really excellent question. I think a lot of people who want to write erotica come up against the language, particularly if the language hasn’t been comfortable for them in the past. Women who’ve been feminist and people from fairly conservative environments might hear those words and be offended. They’re extremely loaded words for many of us. I try not to generate a cliché when I write. Because really the biggest problem with that language isn’t that they’re dirty words, it’s that they’re clichéd dirty words. Plus, the words, for their loaded-ness, have an erotic charge for many people as well. I want to honor and utilize that, because they have an erotic charge for me. I figure that if I stay fairly close to what is erotically compelling for me, in terms of not only the characters and they’re actions, but also the language I’m using to describe them doing it, then hopefully other people will get that response as well. And hopefully, it won’t be too off-putting. If it is too off-putting for someone, then that person needs another story. A writer can not be all things to all people. They have to develop a voice and do what they’re called upon to do, and that’s sort of where I leave it.

Another interesting thing is that you’re dealing with a subject matter that is, for the most part, loaded for many people. I’ve talked to a lot of incest survivors and rape survivors and women that have had to deal with looking at sex in a not positive way. For those women, sex has not become sex anymore. It’s become something different. Are you aware of these women as an audience, ever?

Well, I don’t write directly to that audience or let myself go into a place of concern that, “Wow, if I get too explicit, it’s going to freak someone out.” I can’t stop short of where I’m aiming for that reason. I can’t let somebody other than I be the primary reader. What I hope is, that in some cases at least, even people that have not been able to have good experiences around sexuality will be spoken to. That is, if they end up reading my stuff at all, which they certainly may choose not to do. I hope that one of the two things that I try to have in all my writing will speak to them. One of those things is that I try to bring intelligence to erotica. I try not to dumb any of it down, ever. I want it to be erotic writing that can make people think and that can feed the brain, as well as all the other parts. Another thing I hope is that adding more complexity and intellect to the sex writing will actually be a positive thing. You don’t want your sexuality simplified, reduced, and constructed, which is what abuse can do. Not always, but can. I hope that making it non-simplistic, being no holds barred and over the top, will actually be useful.

Of course, any reader always reserves the right to say, “I’m not going there with you.” Even with my more explicit smut or any argument that I’m spitting out in an essay. I just hope people will go, “Oh, that’s interesting!” Or at the very least. “Huh! I never thought of it that way!” To me, that’s the main exchange I hope for with a reader. If they then go along for the ride, well then, that’s fabulous. So even if somebody hasn’t had good and very consensual sexual experiences, my hope is that pulling out all the stops gives a vision of a sexuality that’s so important to people that it’s clearly more layered and worth taking risks for. That it’s more than what some people think sexuality has been for them so far.