Psychosexuality... Today? Weekly? Whatever.

So anyway... I have been putting off making a podcast called Psychosexuality Today for a long, long time. At first this was largely due to the seemingly out of reach promise of the title Psychosexuality Today, which I thought of before anything else. I can't possibly, at this point, make a daily podcast about anything worth listening to. I'm busy talking about movies and feelings and shooting photo and making zines and putting out records. And then, eventually (and too long afterward, I am embarrassed to admit), I realized that I could just call it Psychosexuality Weekly, and that lifts the burden. Sometimes I am slow, I am ashamed to admit. But even making a new weekly show seemed like a heavy lift.

(When I presented this breakthrough to a friend she said, "Honestly, I don't think Psychosexuality Today as a title promises daily content as much as it does exploring the concept in these times." Touché.)

I wanted to produce Psychosexuality... Whatever because I really enjoy writing and thinking and presenting ideas, which is a thing I used to do for newspapers and magazines and now do for free on social media platforms. This is satisfying on one level but also depressing when I think about how much free "content" I am volunteering to tech dipshits. Whenever I think about a thing and present that thing in public, I am heartened to hear from people who say, "Maybe do this regularly somewhere." I wanted to make it a podcast because at some point in the past decade I accidentally became a person who makes podcasts. I wanted to make it into some sort of content series, but I figured I should write for a little while first to make sure there is something here. I want to write about the psychosexuality of it all (more on why soon) and other insights, including advice, which remains one of my favorite things to write, because, again, I miss writing. I did some version of this writing for a few minutes on Substack, but Substack sucks, and so now I am doing this over here.

I am genuinely interested in nearly everything through a psychosexual lens. It is not the only lens worth paying attention to, and like all lenses, it works at any given time alongside other intersecting lenses. Where some folks lean more heavily on understanding the world through a strictly labor/capital-focused lens, others through a cultural lens, others more through a pop-cultural lens, I am most often intrigued by a hope to understand what personally, psychologically, collectively and sociologically can be read into various phenomena by way of their relationship to and with sex and sexuality.

And I still want to make this podcast, and I'll go into why shortly, but enough times have come up where I have been bummed about not making the show (most recently due to the president's relationship with Natalie Harp and the debates about whether or not it's sexual or some other weird thing) that, in fact, this administration has been so ripe for a desire to talk about politics through a psychosexual lens that I am a little sad I gave up being a columnist when Trump first came into office.

Why psychosexuality?

I think a lot about the first time I went on a date. It was barely even a date, I took my best friend with me in case it wasn't a date, a self-fulfilling issue. Without having heard anything about it, we went to see Boogie Nights, which we all understood to be a nightclub movie. We watched it, the porn of it all, and I remember thinking by the end that it's technically about nightclubs, sure, but also about family and technology and media and porn and capitalism and drugs and the 1970s and 80s and the commercialization of sex and I felt like I was fundamentally changed on some level. It was the first time, I think, I concretely realized that sex wasn't some separate thing that exists separate from us and our collective dynamics. And also, at the end of the movie, my date, my best friend and I were faced with Dirk Diggler's massive prosthetic cock near the end of the movie and I at once wondered "Is this even allowed?" And I think about the fact that for some stretch of my teens, the President of the United States was talking on television about what the definition of “is” is, and how all of the adults in our lives were talking about him, his cigar, and his intern's vagina in a story that was ultimately about layers of power, not to mention an opposition party increasingly stacked with perverts pretending to maintain some higher ground. 

Sex, I came to see, was literally everywhere, though somehow conversations about where it intersected with culture and power—beyond pushback and pushback against pushback—was hard to find. This dynamic and resultant dichotomy fascinated me then and continues to fascinate me retrospectively.

And now that lens has helped me understand so much about who and how we are that it shapes how I see and understand the world, and process this specific moment.

3 decades after the nation was transfixed by the bedroom habits of the Clintons, if your job has too much to do with sex, credit card companies can make rules about how you are allowed to go about your banking. 

People are falling in love with word calculators, and the word calculators they fall in love with sometimes appear to convince them to kill themselves.

That we have a generation of young people who appear to have a more regressive attitude about sex than mine did, and while I disagree with the content of the shift, I think I understand on some level how they got here. 

The Marvelization of the cinema has resulted in a decade-long conversation about the sexlessness of superheroes. 

In his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich suggested that authoritarian societies, religions, and patriarchal family structures conspire to suppress natural sexual impulses from a young age and, uh, take a look at literally everything about the Trump administration.

Our present moment is bursting at the seams with psychosexual intrigue. It has been in my own consciousness for as far back as I can remember, and I want to better understand these themes to know why we are the way we are.

The only thing I know about the future, as far as my teen self would be concerned, is that it only gets weirder. But the only constant has been that we as a people, at least as Americans, are absolutely twisted about sex.

I'll touch on other stuff along the way too. I mentioned earlier I'll be offering advice, not just on all things psychosexual, because I like writing about advice and it seems to work for some folks. But this is what we'll be doing over here. I'll only send out one email a week, I promise. I hope you'll join me.