Julia Yost pushing back on her guest, filmmaker Erika Lust, who had argued that people's reluctance about porn comes from patriarchal shame. Yost says most people's reticence about sex is about privacy and personal values, not shame.
Yeah. Sure. I mean, I'm talking about people who tend to have, you know, five or more kids. So they're definitely having sex.
Right. So I know
they're definitely not inhibited from it in their own lives. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I would suggest is that America's favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. And so you could say, 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 a kind of thing like, 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. And so 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 it is your mission to oppose.
I don't want to push porn on anyone if you don't want to watch it, I think. No, certainly. I don't take you to be saying that. 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 many…
this has been fascinating. Erika Lust, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much.