Why Are We Having Less Sex? Ask a Pornographer.

This episode includes a detailed discussion of pornography and descriptions of sex.

Pornography gets the blame for a lot of societal problems, including the so-called “sex recession.” Can porn ever really be ethical? Erika Lust thinks so. The adult filmmaker sees porn as an art form. She’s a self-described feminist who centers women’s desires and fantasies in her work. But how different is the product she’s making?

Lust sits down with Julia Yost, senior editor at “First Things,” to make the case for porn. Together, they discuss the adult film industry, stigmas around sex and translating fantasy into reality.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Julia Yost: Erika Lust, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

You’re the first pornographer I’ve ever met.

Erika Lust: Oh!

Yost: As far as I know. And you’re a great advocate for porn and the cultural work that it can do.

I am not, to be clear. Nonetheless, I think we can find some common ground.

Tell me, how did Erika Hallqvist, a good girl from Sweden, become Erika Lust, world renowned adult filmmaker?

Lust: Well, it is a longer story. I try to tell it in the book, obviously, that has just come out here in the U.S. It’s an unexpected story, I think, for many people. Most think that people who are working in porn are doing it because they come from poor circumstances, that they had no other choice, and then somehow, they ended up in this industry.

Well, I studied political science in Sweden. I grew up in Sweden, one of the countries in this world with a feminist background, with sex education. We have a tradition of being a country that is a little bit more sexually liberated.

When I was growing up and I started to get in contact with my sexuality and wanted to figure out more about myself, I watched porn. Back then it was a whole different situation, because we didn’t have access to the internet that young people have access to today.

What I felt was that there was this discrepancy in my body. My body got turned on by looking at these images, but at the same time I felt conflict. I felt that something was not working for me.

It felt like the women were there mostly to please the men. But it wasn’t really their story.

And I asked myself: Why is it this way? Can it be different? Does another kind of porn exist?

When I started to talk to people and search for some things on that early internet, I found a book by a wonderful film professor from Berkeley, Linda Williams, called “Hard Core.” That book really changed my mind about pornography.

Through that book, I realized that pornography is not just porn. It’s more than that. It’s a discourse about sexuality and about gender and about how we relate to each other sexually.

Yost: Walk me through a day on set — without getting too explicit. How do you direct people to have sex?

Lust: What I’m doing is independent filmmaking, so I shoot with mostly female and queer crews. We are sometimes 50 people behind the camera. They are films that have been developed, that have characters. They have a narrative, they have a visual style to it.

What most people are curious about is: How do you work with performers? How does this really work? Do you put them at risk? Do they have a say?

We talk all the time to performers — the production team, the talent managers — to get to know them, to see who they are, what they like, and what they don’t like. Then, when they get cast for a film, we talk through everything in detail, about the film and about how they feel. What do they want to do with these characters? How do we develop the sexual tension and situation together?

And we don’t only talk about their boundaries and things that they don’t want to do, which is obviously something we do talk about, but we also talk a lot about the pleasure side of sex. What do they like? How do they like to get touched? We get into detail here. What is the easiest way to make them come? Can we make it happen on camera?

Then when we actually shoot this, we do the sex talk again in the morning when we arrive on set. We look at different angles. We also get the technical crew involved — our D.O.P. [director of photography, or cinematographer] and the camera operators — and then we will look at it from a more cinematic angle. Where do we have the good light? What kind of positions work in this scenario so that everything around feels great for everyone?

Yost: You have a lot of protocols to ensure safety and consent for everyone involved in your shoots. Can you describe those?

Lust: We have something that we call the “Bill of Rights” that every performer gets to see and read and sign before a shoot. We agree on how the process is going to work out. It’s also so that we both understand our responsibilities, because when you come in as a performer, it’s very important that you are aware that if anything doesn’t feel right, you need to voice that. But to be able to voice that, it’s important that they really feel that they are in an environment where they can speak up and they’re not going to get punished for it.

Yost: I wanted to ask about that. It strikes me that these are not normal labor practices. When you talk about your performers, your emphasis is always on the way in which they’re expressing themselves, they’re finding themselves, they’re connecting with each other, and then sharing that with viewers. But then you also need to follow up with them after the shoot and make sure they’re OK.

I wanted to ask, what do you feel that you’re protecting them from?

Lust: It’s being a support to make sure that afterward they don’t have second thoughts or other feelings. Because when you are on set, it is also somehow a euphoric experience. You come in, you are being taken care of, you feel like a star for that day. So many things are happening or going on, so many decisions are being made, and what I really want to do is to check in afterward whether they have any second thoughts about anything that could have happened.

Yost: So if someone does have second thoughts, what does that tend to look like? What kind of ambivalence or distress are they expressing to you, and how do you handle that?

Lust: I haven’t had that kind of situation where someone has said: Oh, I didn’t feel good at all — but I have had small comments on certain situations. There might have been someone spanking someone on the ass and then a performer saying: Hey Erika, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t want that part to be part of the film — for example. This is the kind of conversation that we are having .

Yost: What distinguishes pornography from a project like, say, “Euphoria,” which is an HBO drama that incorporates a lot of explicit elements but is certainly not classified as porn in genre terms?

You’re always emphasizing the cinematic and narrative elements of your work. You describe it as boutique, but you’re not trying to shed the porn label. In fact, you embrace it. So to you, what is it that makes your work porn?

Lust: Because I’m interested in exciting you. That’s part of the work. I’m interested in finding these erotic narratives, the stories, taking you as the audience on an erotic journey.

And when you talk about a series like “Euphoria” — I couldn’t watch the last season myself because I’m very sensitive to violence, and from what I’ve seen from the trailers it felt too violent to me — but the idea behind it is not to excite you.

Yost: Your project is not just aesthetic, it’s also moral or ethical. You’ve been called the “queen of ethical porn.” So explain ethical porn.

Lust: Well, always when we talk about “ethical,” it becomes very complicated, because what I’m really talking about when we say “ethical porn” is about the working conditions, the working standards, the whole process. How do we put it in practice? That’s the main goal of talking about ethical porn.

I also think it extends — we also have to think about how we market it, how we distribute it, and how we consume it. The whole ethical aspect also enters for consumers. For me, it’s essential that people understand that to make great pornography, it has a cost. You have to pay people a fair salary — crew and performers and staff, obviously. To do that, we need a budget. And to be able to have the support of that budget, you need to find a system that works.

I’m an independent production company owned by me and my husband. There are no big investors. There is nobody else in this. But the way we make this work is through our audience. It’s through our community of subscribers to our online cinema or streaming platform. They are the ones that are supporting the way we can actually make these films.

I would ask people that when they consume porn, don’t do it from the free online platforms. Don’t do it!

Yost: Yeah, support your local pornographer. Absolutely.

Lust: Exactly. Think the same way as you’re thinking about food or restaurants…

Yost: Fair trade, this and that.

Lust: … Or fair trade or clothes. We should all be more responsible consumers here, and we need to understand that as consumers, we have a great deal of power. We do. People and big industries and businesses, they see where you click and how much time you spend on something. You actually vote by spending your time online on certain sites.

I really would like to ask people to think twice and look for independent — independent — pornography.

Yost: Could you talk about realism as an aspect of your pornographic ethics?

Lust: Realism?

Yost: Yeah. It seems to me that you’re very interested in being realistic about the mechanics of female pleasure.

Lust: I am, definitely. I want it to feel real to my audience. I want my audience to feel that we are representing sex the way that they can find pleasure in real life.

This is also something that has upset me when I have watched what we call mainstream porn. Normally women are not portrayed in a realistic sexual context. It looks and feels very fake. I’m especially thinking about clitoral stimulation, that most women need during intercourse to be able to come.

[Laughs.] Can we say this? Can we say clitoral stimulation?

Yost: I believe we can. We may get an explicit label, but we can say it.

So you would consider your style of porn feminist? That’s part of your ethics?

Lust: I consider myself a feminist.

Yost: OK.

Lust: And I make porn. That’s how I would put it.

Yost: What does feminism mean for you in the context of porn?

Lust: In the context of porn, I would go to two things: Participation behind the camera. Who’s making this film? Who’s in the process? Who has the right to make decisions? And then I will talk about representation. What do we see onscreen? Not only women, obviously, but how is gender portrayed? Do we see different kinds of power relations where the films are helping us to understand who is who and how they are negotiating?

I feel that many times in regular mainstream kinds of pornography, that conversation is happening outside the camera. It’s not happening in the film. But I know from experience and from working with many performers that this is standard in the adult industry today. It’s standard to have all these negotiations. So even if you don’t see it in the scene, it’s probably happened before.

But I think it really can help the audience if they get to see it onscreen.

Yost: Yeah. So you really emphasize character and narrative and context and all these forms of complexity. I’m listening to you talk and thinking: Wow, she makes porn sound like a George Eliot novel.

[Lust laughs.]

But your account of porn’s positive work is not universally accepted by feminists. In the ’70s and ’80s, Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography inherently subjugated women, like other forms of sex work.

Archival recording of Andrea Dworkin: “Pornography… is a system of sexual exploitation, in which women are devalued. Women are turned into commodities. Women are sold as meat. Women are in fact tortured… Pornography creates both physical aggression toward women and attitudes and behaviors of discrimination, and it makes every struggle that we have toward civil equality essentially ridiculous.”

Yost: So why should women embrace porn and sex work broadly?

Lust: Well, there’s many types of feminism, just as there’s many kinds of porn, obviously. Part of the feminist movement believes that there could never exist a fair feminist kind of pornography.

Obviously I don’t agree with them. I think that we as women have the right to our pleasure, to our sexuality, and we need space to try things out and to get into our own fantasies and desire and to revise them.

I am also a product of this world we live in. I’m a product of this patriarchy, and my fantasies are not only my fantasies, but they are a construct of what I have learned in this society since I was a little girl. And pornography is helping us to get rid of that sexual shame that so many of us somehow feel.

Yost: So far we’ve been focusing on your work and talking around the other world of porn out there, the type that floods the internet. What is the nonfeminist pornography that you are working against?

Lust: It’s almost everything that’s out there. It’s lots of people and creators who really have no interest in how to show female pleasure onscreen, but are more interested in the business of pornography. They’re interested, not so much in the actual sex, but in the clicks and in the algorithms.

What I’ve seen is a business that has been taken over by many of these tech guys. If we look back at the ’60s and the ’70s, when we had this golden era of porn and the porn was even in the theaters, many of the creators back then, they were filmmakers, they were artists. They were people who had a vision and who had this reaction to a conservative world that they lived in back then and wanted to show a more liberated sexuality.

But then, as society advanced, we got into the videocassette era, and then to the beginning of the internet, with this pay site and the photo archives with images that you could slowly download. And then we get to the era we now live in, with the “tube” sites taking over.

This is where these tech guys really come in. They’re not that interested in the sex anymore, but rather in the technology of it.

Yost: So what kind of porn do those sites tend to host? What are the mechanics of it? What’s the style of it? Is it substantively misogynistic?

Lust: It’s phallocentric. I would use that as the first way of describing it. It’s about men and their sexuality. And women are many, many times reduced to some kind of object in that sexuality, but it’s not really their stories.

Yost: There’s a big audience surely for this misogynistic porn which you critique. Is there something wrong with the millions of men who are using it to fantasize? You say that women have a right to their desires, including desires that have been shaped by the patriarchy. Do men not?

Lust: No, of course, they also have a right to fantasizing and desire. But I think we have to think … How should I put it? It’s a job each of us have to understand what we are desiring and what we are fantasizing about and how it affects us in our life.

I also think it’s very important that we understand that we are cultural products. We are socialized with the general ideas that we have as human beings, and if we understand those and we criticize them and we think about them, we are also able to change.

So I think sometimes men haven’t even realized that what they are attracted to in some sexual circumstances is this misogynistic concept.

Yost: What if a woman were attracted to a misogynistic concept?

Lust: Well, they are. Many, many women are. We all are. But we have to be able to explore it and to think about it.

When it comes to porn, it’s also interesting how we all have this personal relationship to it, to what we enjoy when nobody watches us, and then how we talk about it when we’re in front of other people, when we are in contact with other people. Sometimes what we see is how that conversation changes.

Yost: How does it change as a whole?

Lust: It changes in the sense that we feel that what we like is shameful and is something that we shouldn’t like. And then when we talk about it to other people, we don’t recognize what actually turns us on.

Yost: Where does it come from, that idea that what we like is shameful, that our desires are shameful? What’s your sense of that?

Lust: It has a long tradition. We can go back many, many years in history and what we see is a change from Roman culture to Christian culture, where we start seeing how the church somehow is dividing all these goddesses — women — that we had in the past, who were representing so many things, representing power, representing fertility, representing sexuality.

And then when we get into this moment of history, they are being divided into different roles. Suddenly we have the whore on the one side, and we have the respectable mother figure Maria, the saint, on the other side.

Yost: My understanding of the scholarship around the transition from pre-Christian to Christian Rome is that Christianity was the force that accorded rights to women in the domain of sex and marriage, and also basically said: Hands off the little boys.

I was struck by that moment in your book where you describe going to, I think it was Pompeii?

Lust: Yes.

Yost: Yes. And you saw the frescoes, and there was ——

Lust: The erect penises.

Yost: Yes, exactly. And, I don’t know, orgies or whatever, depicted on walls. You felt that was a very liberating moment, and you thought, yes, there was a time when sex was just so elaborately incorporated into art, and it was out in the open, and it was not consigned to the red-light district. It’s just in people’s dining rooms or whatever.

And I thought, yeah, but that was part of a sexual dispensation that was actually quite cruel to both women and children. I’m not sure you really want to live in Pompeii before the volcano.

Lust: [Chuckles.] I would rather live there today than in any period of the past.

Yost: Yeah, I’m sure you would.

We’re recording this conversation in the midst of a pretty big story here in the U.S. I’m not sure if you’ve been following the story of the Cornell Seven. Seven young men are accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in the context of group sex under the influence of drugs and alcohol on a college campus.

I was thinking about this story as I read your book and wondering whether the students had drawn on some scenario they had picked up from porn — a gangbang scenario.

I wanted to ask you, when pornographic fantasy meets reality, as it will sometimes do, is there potential for risk or danger?

Lust: What we see in cinema, we see it in film, we see it in video games, we read it in books and obviously some of these stories are also portrayed in porn. But I don’t think that porn has this kind of magical power that it’s so much bigger than other media in influencing people in doing exact acts.

What I see is a huge lack of sex education. I see a huge lack of conversation around sex and around consent and respecting women. And I think that those conversations and that sex education is what we really, really need to focus on now.

We cannot continue censoring voices who are speaking about eroticism and who are speaking about sexuality. We cannot censor books in school. We cannot cut sex education programs when it’s so clearly seen that it’s needed.

Yost: This is interesting. What do you think sex education should encompass? Because in the United States it tends to be how not to get pregnant, how not to get an S.T.D. — I guess we’re calling them S.T.I.s [sexually transmitted infections] now.

Lust: That’s the basics.

Yost: That’s the basics?

Lust: That’s the absolute basics.

Yost: But you had the Nordic model growing up, and that’s much more extensive. What would you have children learning, and from what age?

Lust: Right from the beginning. For me, it’s not one sex conversation that you have to have and when suddenly your kid is ——

Yost: So we’re talking first grade?

Lust: —— Yes. We’re talking parents who need to be part of this from the beginning. I think we need to be more natural with conversations around sex. People are discovering their bodies from a very young age, and what we are doing is giving them messages. Sometimes if we don’t give them vocabulary, they don’t even know how to name their sexual organs.

If we don’t have these conversations with them, we are sending them directly into trouble.

Yost: Yeah, they’ll learn it from Pornhub or whatever.

Lust: Well, they’ll learn it from all over our society. Some might learn it from Pornhub, others might learn it from “Euphoria.” We have to be aware of the importance in today’s society of being media literate, of being porn literate, of being able to think critically of anything you read or see.

We all know that on socials there are messages being passed on to our kids and teens and young adults and adults all the time.

Yost: So a sex ed curriculum for you would certainly include porn literacy and also …

Lust: Gender identity questions.

Yost: OK, gender identity. So kids being asked about their pronouns every week? Because you get that in some of the toniest schools.

Lust: It’s not that they have to be asked every week about their pronouns. What we need to be able to do is to stop this heteronormative culture that we have. We need to enter a queer perspective into all sex education. We need to make people feel that they have a right over their bodies and their identities, and that they can safely express that and be respected and that they can get an inclusive, diverse sex education without having this very heteronormative perspective that is still the most powerful that we see in sex education in most countries.

Yost: To return us to the Cornell case, the question about fantasy versus reality, you’re proposing a pretty sturdy border between those two. For you, it’s just kind of: OK, porn is porn, and remember these are trained professionals on a closed course, and do not attempt unless you really, really want to, and you’re going to be really careful — or something like that.

Lust: Correct.

Yost: One of the reasons I wanted to bring up the Cornell case is because gangbangs feature prominently in your new book. The first chapter is titled “Does Every Woman Deserve a Gang-Bang?” In it, you write about overcoming your discomfort with gangbangs in order to film one.

Why was it important for you to push past that discomfort and make that film?

Lust: Because I had, like so many people, this idea that we are talking about, that a gangbang is a situation where a group of men are preying on a woman.

Then I met a performer, an actor, Kazumi. We were in a meeting, talking about potentially making a film together. I had maybe more romantic ideas for this film, but then when we started to talk about what she really liked and what she wanted to do, this idea of her wanting to do a gangbang with five men came up time after time after time. So I had to challenge my own prejudices.

Then when she started to explain how she felt about it and she told me real life stories of her life outside the adult industry and situations she had had, and she told me about all the fun and how it made her feel to be the center of so much attention and so much care, it really opened up my mind.

Yost: You write: “A woman enjoying sex with multiple men on her own terms for her own gratification is the ultimate anti-patriarchal sex fantasy. No wonder it’s taboo.” That’s kind of the understanding of the gangbang that you finally reached.

But I do wonder whether that taboo, and perhaps also your discomfort, arose in part from an intuition that was arguably vindicated by the Cornell case, namely that one woman having sex with multiple men is objectively a risky situation.

I wonder whether some stigmas on sex may exist for good reason because the activities that are stigmatized are intrinsically risky.

Lust: I think many of the stigmas we have come from these kinds of situations from the past where a woman feels that she’s in a risky situation. Walking through a park at night, I would feel that that’s a risky situation. It’s a situation where many women would hold their keys in their hands. But also, if we don’t face some of these risky situations, then we don’t have the same opportunities, the same possibilities ——

Yost: So every woman deserves a gangbang, is what I’m getting from you.

Lust: —— To go out, to live, to feel. I think that this was also something that was in Virginie Despentes’s book, “King Kong Theory,” where she talks a lot about this idea that even if there’s risk, go out into the world and experience and take up space and learn on the way.

Yost: Your advocacy of porn seems to presume that we live in a patriarchy in which girls and women are taught to feel shame about their bodies and desires, and that demonizing pornography is an extension of that.

But is this true? It seems to me that most of the messaging to girls and women is sex-positive, and pornography certainly has been normalized to the extent that it’s been widely adopted. So who needs to hear the good news of sexual liberation?

Lust: I don’t agree. Sex-positive messages — yes, some of them we have. Empowerment messages — yes, some of them are out there. But at the same time, I still see so many women worrying about their own sexuality, about what they project to the world, how they are dressing, what kind of sex they want to have, what kind of sex they accept having.

I still hear so many stories of women being in sexual relationships, especially with heterosexual men, where not only is the orgasm gap really, really happening, but also the whole sex act is focused on pleasing their men instead of really having a life-fulfilling moment for themselves.

And when I talk to them and they describe how they’re having sex by themselves, it’s a whole different story.

Yost: Do you think there’s too much reticence around the question of the mechanics of female pleasure? That people don’t talk enough about that?

Lust: People talk about it, but I think they could still talk lots more about it. It’s also different in different generations.

I’m hearing a lot lately about people stuck on social media, stuck on their cellphones, connecting much less with people. We hear reports about young people not having as much sex anymore.

Yost: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.

Lust: We hear reports about the A.I. girlfriends. That seems easier for some young men to connect to than real people.

Sex involves intimacy, it involves negotiation, it involves friction, it involves difficult conversations sometimes.

Yost: Yeah. So we’re talking about, what I’ll call, in-person sex.

Lust: Mm-hmm. In-person sex.

Yost: Whereas porn is other people’s sex that you’re watching. So I think that for you, porn can facilitate in-person sex or can foster connections between flesh and blood human beings who watch it. But I wonder whether that’s universally the case. Do you see the abundance of porn on the internet as contributing to the problem of the decline of sex?

Lust: I think it starts with the people who have anxieties about sex, fear, shame, difficulties connecting to other people. I think that technology really has worsened this situation, because we have less interaction with real people, and people are afraid of getting humiliated somehow through connecting, through not being accepted by a potential partner or not knowing how to reach out. They are scared that it’s going to go wrong somehow.

I think that all this kind of anxiety has led to many people having an easier time fulfilling their sexual needs watching porn online than connecting with other people.

Yost: So it’s kind of old-fashioned shame at bottom? That’s the issue?

Lust: I think so.

Yost: So you don’t see the availability of porn as a replacement for actual partners?

Lust: I don’t think it is. I honestly don’t think it is. You want to connect with someone.

Yost: No, I agree!

Lust: You want to touch someone. You want to be in the same room.

Yost: I’m with you.

Lust: You want the bodies to be active in this.

Yost: I’m completely with you, but not everybody’s with us on that.

Lust: But I think they are fearing it. I don’t know if it’s that they don’t want it or that the fear is so big and they have so little knowledge in how to connect to others.

Yost: Oh, I think the revealed preferences are that a lot of people do actually prefer to have perfect control over their sexual experiences, which they can get with a vibrator and Pornhub — whatever. I don’t know.

Lust: It’s hard! It’s hard to ask another person.

Yost: It is.

Lust: It’s hard to ask for what you want. And here we get to the point again, where so many people don’t even know what they want. They don’t know what they want.

Sex education — here we go. We need sex education.

Yost: But I guess I wonder whether too much exploration can make sex actually less enjoyable. There’s a recent report that was written up in “The Atlantic” that found that married churchgoing Americans have the most sex of any demographic group in the country.

It would seem that the most vanilla people have the hottest sex lives. Explain that to me.

Lust: Maybe it’s the connection after church on Sunday.

Yost: Maybe.

Lust: Maybe.

Yost: But I just wonder about the relation of porn to satisfaction. Is it possible that people who spend a lot of time watching other people have sex and thinking about the kinds of sex they could be having but probably aren’t — could they be more prone to sexual dissatisfaction?

Lust: Here it’s also a question of how much porn are we really watching? This is also an interesting subject because many people who consider themselves porn addicts, when they actually look at the numbers of how much porn they’re watching, they watch much less porn than people who don’t consider themselves porn addicts.

And there’s this idea, the moral incongruence idea ——

Yost: Yeah, the funny thing about that though is that, to me, that doesn’t undermine their position. It’s just a description of their struggle. Because if you’re a person who doesn’t want to be using porn, you have some kind of objection to it — maybe it’s religious, maybe it’s not religious, maybe you just want to practice more temperance in your life or discipline or whatever, or you find it’s getting in the way of your finding other people to connect with — you’re going to try not to use it. You will probably use less of it.

But to the extent that you do use it, it’s because you feel compelled, you feel like you have a compulsion. I think that’s where the language of compulsion and addiction comes from, the sense that people feel sort of captured by porn. They feel that they cannot quit it, even though they want to.

I did want to ask you about people like that. What would you say to them? Is their job simply to put away their shame? Or could there be a way in which their desire to be rid of porn is valid?

Lust: I think you have to find a balance that works for you in your own life. I feel that, first of all, it’s also a question of what kind of porn are you watching? I would like to watch porn that I feel represents my value, and I would not connect to a kind of pornography that I feel is not representing me.

For me, it’s important to use these moments as a connection with my own erotic self. It’s almost a moment of erotic mindfulness somehow.

Yost: You’re a virtuoso of porn. I think that for most people it’s not a mindfulness moment probably.

Lust: [Chuckles.] But maybe it’s also because the porn that I watch, the porn I make, the porn that I’m in contact with, it’s so great. It’s so beautiful.

Yost: Yeah, you have a good porn diet, no doubt.

Lust: So it’s true that I live in a bubble of sex positivity and people who are wanting to explore their identity through this kind of pornography.

Yost: But I just repeatedly hear you describing the psychology of that refusal as arising from shame, that everybody has shame over their bodies, shame over their desires. They think sex is dirty, and we have to use sex education and whatnot to train people out of that.

I have to say that that does not ring true to me. My social and professional networks are very conservative on sex, and the idea of shame about desire and sex being dirty, those are not sentiments that I would attribute to anyone I know.

Lust: Seriously?

Yost: Oh, no. No.

Lust: You don’t feel that people are thinking …

Yost: I think that they agree with you that sex is extremely important and meaningful.

Lust: Yes.

Yost: And they take that insight in a different direction. They say because of that, we honor it by putting certain parameters on it, which not everybody needs to accept, obviously. It’s a free society.

But that is the logic. I would say that is my logic. That’s the logic of pretty much everyone I know. If they do think that sex is shameful, they’re not saying it out loud, so they’re ashamed of the idea that they think sex is shameful.

Lust: But I think that that is happening. I think that that is also happening.

Yost: What is?

Lust: That some people think that they don’t want to say that they think that sex is shameful. In a conversation, they want to be open and liberal and make other people feel that they are not judging anyone.

Yost: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’m talking about people who tend to have five or more kids, so they’re definitely having sex.

Lust: Right.

Yost: So they’re definitely not inhibited from it in their own lives. I think one thing I would suggest is that America’s favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla.

Lust: Uh-huh.

Yost: And so you could say—

Lust: But it’s a good flavor

Yost: It’s a great flavor.

Lust: Why not?

Yost: Why not? One could say that in a patriarchy death by chocolate is taboo because people think that cocoa powder is dirty. But then you would just get a lot of American women saying: “No, thank you. I’m just a vanilla gal.”

It’s not that there’s a fear of porn. There’s often just the kind of thing that it’s private like my finances are private. Sex is private for reasons that don’t have to do with its intrinsically shameful nature, which I just don’t think that all that many people believe in anymore.

It just comes down to how you want to play it, and that often implicates values, but I don’t think that the values are this kind of patriarchal misogynistic thing that I feel like is your mission to oppose.

Lust: I don’t want to push porn on anyone.

Yost: Oh, no. Agreed, agreed.

Lust: If you don’t want to watch it, I think that’s the one thing.

Yost: No, certainly. I don’t take you to be saying that.

Lust: What I do want is to offer an alternative for people who felt that we couldn’t find the kind of pornography that we wanted to watch. And I think that we are, quite a lot of people, feeling that way.

Yost: Well, this has been fascinating. Erika Lust, it’s been a pleasure.

Lust: Thank you very much.

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