Episode 13: Rethinking Sex

Wear is the Love, Episode #13

We have a special guest join us this week on Wear is the Love — Washington Post Columnist Christine Emba. Christine’s excellent new book, “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” releases on Tuesday, March 22, and Michael and I wanted to make sure you had the opportunity to hear about this vital work from its author. Rethinking Sex looks at cultural assumptions about sex and how our current approach to sex as a culture is actually working out for people. Christine offers a different path forward that we hope will open up the conversation about sex.

We loved talking to Christine, and commend her book to you—not because we agree with every line of it, but because of the work it does and the potential it has to reset and open up a toxic, destructive culture when it comes to sex. Additionally, an excerpt from the book ran in WaPo this week, and it’s in the Top 5 below.

Please note that if you typically listen to our podcast with your kids, we want you to know that because of the subject matter, we talk about sex and consent, plus sexual assault is mentioned a few times. However, if your child is of an age or maturity level in which they may discuss these kinds of topics, we think the podcast is a good conversation starter.

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “Opinion: Consent is not enough. We need a new sexual ethic.” (Washington Post)

   Because “In our post-sexual-revolution culture, there seems to be wide agreement among young adults that sex is good and the more of it we have, the better. That assumption includes the idea that we don’t need to be tied to a relationship or marriage; that our proclivities are personal and that they are not to be judged by others — not even by participants. In this landscape, there is only one rule: Get consent from your partner beforehand. But the outcome is a world in which young people are both liberated and miserable. While college scandals and the #MeToo moment may have cemented a baseline rule for how to get into bed with someone without crossing legal lines, that hasn’t made the experience of dating and finding a partner simple or satisfying. Instead, the experience is often sad, unsettling, even traumatic.”

2. “Taking Stock” (Real Life Magazine)

   Because this essay details the rise of “creator” in business jargon and “just as social media platforms early on helped rationalize co-creation as self-expression, a new suite of apps and tools want to do the same for ‘the creator economy,’ only now monetization opportunities (and not, it should be noted, guaranteed money) are a central part of the package.”

3. “Night Shifts” (Harper’s Magazine)

   Because “When I spoke about the state of the field with the dream researcher Erin Wamsley, she described a kind of disappointment, a sense that the breakthrough insights into the nature of dreaming that seemed imminent a decade or two ago haven’t materialized. Over the past few years, this perceived impasse has led to the emergence of what a recent special issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition dubbed “dream engineering.” To adapt Marx’s maxim, if hitherto the scientists have attempted to understand dreams, the engineers now seek to change them. In fact, the engineers argue that we can’t deepen our understanding of dreams unless we can change them.”

4. “Will the Ukraine War End the Age of Populism?” (NYT)

   Because “The sudden sense of Western unity seems very, well, Western; it’s not a global coalition confronting Putin so much as a Euro-American one, infused with more than a little of the civilizational chauvinism that liberalism aspires to stand above. In the American media, too, it’s centrist jingoism rather than liberal cosmopolitanism that seems ascendant at the moment”

5. “Make America Good Again” (New Republic)

   Because, “On the one hand are the exceptionalists—those who hold faith in an America that is unique in the world and destined for greatness. Opposing the exceptionalists are a motley crew spread across right, left, and center who argue that America is, even beyond Trump’s relatively amoral formulation, a force for ill. Let’s call this inchoate ideology counter-exceptionalism. It’s not anti-exceptionalist—that is, it is not simply an argument against American exceptionalism. Rather, it is an argument affirming exceptionalism’s inverse: an ideology that argues that America either has always been, or has become, a unique force for ill in the world.”