A Culture Totally Ignorant Around The Realm of Sexual Fantasy

 

I was sitting on a weathered wooden bench next to Brian (“or was it Ryan?!?” I later wrote in my journal). We were sharing a bottle of rum that he’d stolen from a convenience store of a mega hotel with a thundering waterfall in its lobby. I was a high school sophomore on a Hawaiian vacation with my parents—and I’d been invited by some boys to a party on the beach. Brian and I swigged while staring out at the white sand, where a dozen or so other kids similarly swigged. Nearby, a girl around my age wearing a strappy tank top and short shorts was yelling while falling into some bushes of beach cabbage. The thick mass of waxy green leaves and bursting white flowers cushioned her tiny body before she bounced right back and then promptly fell again.
 
Her words were slurred by booze and muted by the falls, but I got the impression she was yelling at me. In response, Brian said, loud enough for all to hear: “Don’t pay attention to her. That’s just Trashy Ashley.” I wasn’t even sure of Brian’s name in that moment, but all these years later, I still remember “Trashy Ashley” with the crystal clarity of the neighboring pool.
 
Then I was throwing up into the beach cabbage. Brian, I later wrote in my journal, “was so sweet about it.” He told me I’d feel better once it was “out of my system” and walked me to a beach chair where we proceeded to make-out. “That shit was SO amazing (underlined),” I wrote of this post-vomit tongue-wrestling, my first real kiss. Then he suggested we try one of the cabanas by the pool, which had privacy curtains that could be closed completely. I’d just had my first kiss, but now came in quick succession: first fingering, first hand job, first blow job, first cunnilingus. Then, at his suggestion: first “titty fucking” and first “69.”
 
All the while, I kept a vigilant eye on the curtains of the cabana, knowing that any of the nearby partiers could easily peek in, noting that the rum was making the edges of my vision blur, and understanding that “bad things” could happen to girls in moments like this. Brian suggested sex and I gave a firm “no.” About this, I felt “really good,” I later wrote, obviously proud at standing up for myself. Now, this makes me wonder whether there were other acts to which I might have liked to have said “no,” and if I even knew the answer at the time.
 
In my journal, I concluded the Hawaii scene by writing, “He comes, yada yada yada.” Yada yada yada. As though I’d ever done that before, as though it were already old hat. I was emphatic about my own enjoyment, though: “It was fun, & I’ll be smiling & happy for the next week, non-stop (underlined),” I wrote. “It was like an AMAZING (underlined) in-my-dreams fantasy come to life.” I went on to volunteer, “I don’t feel demeaned or degraded or stupid or anything (underlined). He wasn’t taking advantage of me, I did exactly what I wanted & got exactly what I wanted, same w/him.”
 
It was a lot of underlined text.
 
A few years ago, I returned to this long-ago journal entry after a deep-dive into contemporary feminist research that mapped the shifting sexual landscape for young women. My teenage voice read just like the subjects of those papers analyzing narratives around young women’s sexual agency: the emphatic denial of victimhood, the claims of being in control, and the emphasis of getting exactly what I wanted. These were part of neoliberal feminist narratives that emerged in the nineties, alongside shouts of “girl power.”
 
Those narratives emphasized young women’s potential for empowerment through individual choice and striving. The scholar Laina Bay-Cheng suggests that this emerging ideology created a new metric by which young women’s sexual behaviors were judged. There wasn’t just the virgin-slut dichotomy anymore, but also the dictate of sexual agency. This contemporary scholarship hit me as an energizing revelation in its nuance and compassion.
 
If neoliberal narratives around sexual agency emerged in the nineties, the 2000s were when a manifestation of this phenomenon was given a popular moniker, with Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. The book took aim at a moment in which women were “making sex objects of other women—and of themselves” amid the “frat party of pop culture.” I flinched whenever passing the book’s hot-pink cover in my college bookstore. It wasn’t that I intellectually disagreed with the general assessment; it just felt at times that Levy was arguing against a caricature, like the one-dimensional mud flap girl leaning against the title on the book’s cover.
 
Her book presaged an era of worry about the choices privileged young women were making around things like having casual sex, watching pornography, and taking strip aerobics classes. As manifested in the media, the young woman of concern was often specifically white, middle- to upper-class, and heterosexual. The very concept of the “girl gone wild” implies a progression—a passage from “good” to “bad.” Historically, women of color have been portrayed through racist stereotypes as inherently wild; Black women, in particular, assigned by default to the category of “bad” girl, as the professor Patricia Hill Collins has explained. The same is true of queer women. To be granted any movement within that dichotomy—to raucously reject the constraints of “goodness” through participation in “raunch culture”—was a privilege, although it was rarely talked about that way.

Soon after Levy’s book, a critique of hookup culture exploded with the publication of Laura Sessions Stepp’s 2007 Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both. It was an extensive journalistic project that raised reasonable questions about the impact of a changing sexual norms on young women, but it also was prone to stunningly old-fashioned declarations, like “having sex with lots of men might limit [one’s] ability to sustain a long-term commitment.” That isn’t to mention such bromides as “Admit it, the bar scene is a guy thing” and “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods.”

 In my early 20s, I pushed back against these kinds of critique, finding many of them sexist, retrograde, and, in the case of Female Chauvinist Pigs, stigmatizing of sex work. I still do. By the time my 30s were in sight, though, I was feeling stifled by the reigning scripts around heterosexual dating and sex. I often silenced my desire for greater pleasure, intimacy, or commitment, while grasping for that narrative of control and self-interest. I started to feel like I was pantomiming empowerment. The growing weight of my own experience underscored a thread of truth in these critiques: The sexual revolution ushered in new freedoms, and new pressures, alongside enduring constraints.

 Recent feminist scholarship makes clear that the strictures of the traditional sexual double standard, holding men as studs and women as sluts, have loosened over the last several decades, leading to a greater range of acceptable, but also mandated, sexual behavior. At the same time, the virgin-slut split has morphed into an ambiguous continuum with “prude” at its center. Bay-Cheng argues that today young women face that additional, intersecting line of sexual judgment: agency.

 Girls, she writes, “are now also evaluated according to the degree of control they proclaim, or are perceived, to exert over their sexual behavior.” That judgment is leveled “by specific individuals, in the rhetoric of popular media,” and “from the broader perspective of the generalized other.” She argues that the appearance of autonomy and self-interest—assessments deeply influenced by biases around race and class—can guard against the enduring insult of “slut.” Researchers have found that the insult of “slut” now has less to do with being sexually active and more to do with being sexually out of control. “The contempt at the crux of contemporary slut-shaming, then, may have less to do with a girl’s adherence to gendered sexual morals than her lack of neoliberal agency,” writes Bay-Cheng.

 In this sense, enthusing over a hookup, and overlooking its nuances and ambiguities, is arguably a form of self-protection for some young women—namely white, cis, middle- to upper-class, heterosexual ones. This new standard of “agency” results from individualized and neoliberal notions of empowerment, which naturally impact “the lives of people who are already living and cast to the margins” by undermining social support.

 The improvement of women’s sexual experiences has now been detached from imperatives of social justice and collective struggle. Instead, empowerment is cast as a personal problem, which places pressure on individuals to successfully navigate systemic disadvantages. In other words: If you are not emotionally and romantically fulfilled, erotically unencumbered, and awash with pleasure, well, hmm. What’s wrong with you? This mentality trades the shared work of social justice, and the acknowledgment of oppression, for “personal responsibility,” in which the only limitations are ostensibly your own.

 Avoiding sexual judgment is all about impression management, which is “not simply a matter of individual skill,” argues Bay-Cheng, as “some girls are bolstered or shielded by race and class privilege,” while others “must ceaselessly work against racist and classist stereotypes of hypersexuality and irresponsibility.” The availability of images of young women seeming to boldly go after their own sexual interests may create the impression of freedom, but feminist scholars writing on the subject over the last couple decades suggest that “the normative burden on girls has only increased in load and complexity,” as Bay-Cheng puts it. The appearance of sexual freedom is one of those normative burdens.

 Of course, if the concept of sexual agency has been misappropriated by neoliberalism, the question becomes: Can it be rescued?  Some feminist scholars—including Deborah Tolman, who has written extensively about adolescent girls and sexuality—have argued that it can be saved in part by returning to a definition “predicated on girls’ development of sexual subjectivity”—in other words, a “sense of oneself as a sexual being, as well as making decisions or simply acting in ways that included or considered one’s own embodied sexual feelings.”

 Such an approach hinges on the understanding that girls’ sexual feelings take place within the strictures of our current social and cultural reality, which can “make their expression dangerous, difficult or even impossible for girls themselves to discern,” as Tolman and her co-authors put it. This version of sexual agency doesn’t deny the reality of systemic oppression, but sits within it, complex and sometimes ambiguous.

 We can wish better for young women—a world that values their desire, subjecthood, and pleasure—but that doesn’t mean the circumstances for that “better” are here now. Sexual violence is pervasive, the state of sex education is abysmal, reproductive rights are under attack, and yawning pleasure disparities persist in heterosexual sex. The choices young women are able to make about their sexual and romantic lives are also deeply impacted by non-sexual factors, Bay-Cheng tells me, like stable access to housing and transportation. This is the enduring legacy of a stalled revolution, which liberated women to have sex in a world still mired in sexism and power imbalances.

 Moving away from neoliberal notions of sexual agency means that we “stop trying to market, measure, or observe it,” Bay-Cheng told me during a recent interview. “A much more fruitful reversal of perspective is to look at the environments in which people exercise agencies,” she says. “Instead of looking at girls, we could maybe take their position and scan the worlds in which they live.” The question then becomes: What can a girl or woman do? “You cannot possibly fix in a systemic way the constraints on agency by trying to change individuals,” says Bay-Cheng. “That is not the source of the problem.” She advocates for “a more thorough analysis of how contextual factors, including non-sexual ones, shape young women’s sexual choices and lives.” This is a seemingly subtle but revolutionary shift from focusing on girls’ and women’s choices to the circumstances within which they make choices.

 Women’s options are fundamentally constrained; their choices are not free. Until we change the context, young women will struggle to make sense of a world full of punishing contradiction, misdirection, and impossibility. They will find whatever compromises and solutions work for them. Too often, those who have safely reached the shores of adulthood look behind and blame young women for the choppy waters they now sail across, as though these women should be better navigators of their own oppression. They shake their heads and cluck their tongues. This disapproval implicitly demands that girls try to enact the fantasy of a finished revolution. It asks them, as does so much of our culture, to perform.

 A couple years ago, I found myself on a beach some thirty miles north of that mega hotel that I’d visited as a 15-year-old in denim cutoffs. I recalled the part of the story that I wanted to forget. Soon after getting together with my high school boyfriend, I’d accidentally left the journal in his car, where his friends promptly discovered it and began reading aloud from my much earlier Hawaii entry: cabana, 69, titty fucking, “he comes, yada yada yada.” Afterward, my boyfriend called me on the phone, voice vibrating with outrage. He said: “I didn’t think you were that kind of girl.”

 I understood that being “that kind of girl” would mean losing him. So I said: “I didn’t want to do all of those things, it didn’t happen like I wrote it, you don’t understand, I only made it seem like I liked it, I felt pressured, it was really intense, I was just trying to get through it, I wanted to get away.”

 I stopped writing in the journal after that, and I stopped trusting which story was true. Both versions were refracted through what I felt these boys wanted of me. I was fifteen years old and already losing my own perspective. All these years later, I have gotten it back: I was a girl living in a world where women’s desire is narrowed to being desired, and where physical and reputational danger lurk behind every sexual encounter. I was a girl living in a world that had granted women new liberties alongside new burdens and existing limitations.

 Both stories were true; both stories were a lie.

 

From : Want Me by Tracy Clark-Flory, published by Penguin Books.

 

The Convenient Lie of 'Sexual Empowerment'. By Tracy Clark-Flory, Jezebel, March 4, 2021.

I  took an excited sip of my after-school Coke before clacking away on my clunky keyboard. Everyone wanted to know “a/s/l” (age, sex, and location), and I lied: 21/f/Florida. Then I entered into a private chat with RedSoxxx72, who promptly typed these words: “Hey sweetheart.” Eek. I pushed myself back from the computer desk, traveling a few feet in my roller chair before coming to a stop. Then I spun myself around a few times, as if to embrace the roiling of my stomach, and scooted back to the keyboard, summoning the women I’d seen in late-night phone sex commercials. “Hey big boy,” I wrote as goose bumps spread across my forearms. Next came that ubiquitous question: “Whatchu wearin?” I looked down at my Dr. Seuss T-shirt and wrote, “Red lace stockings.” He did not delay. “I'm taking those red stockings off right now and slowly licking up those long, luscious legs.” That is as far as I let it go before hammering out, “IM 12!!!!!!” It was 1996, and AOL chatrooms were where I spent most of my afternoons.

 
All these years later, it’s unsettling to revisit this adolescent experimentation; it triggers my protective impulse around the early influx of “adult” information, as well as the very real threat of online predation. But at the same time, I understand that those (fortunately harmless) cybersex sessions were the result of natural adolescent curiosity and yearning around sex—the kind that is unsatisfied by bare-basics parental “sex talks” and rote health-class dictums. When it comes to sex, the internet underscores the gap between what young people want to know and experience, and what adults are comfortable with them knowing and experiencing. That gap is never bridged through parental locks and over-the-top warnings, which heighten young people’s sense of being coddled at best and lied to at worst. It’s addressed through acceptance of teenage wanting, not just for information, but also exploration. On that front, parents often falter, while the internet always delivers. Only in recognizing, and valuing, young people’s sexual interest can adults meaningfully help them navigate sex—online or off.
 
Those early chatrooms were a virtual landscape dominated by the graphic and sometimes alarming desires of boys and men, but they were also the source of the first inklings of my own insistent desire. The internet introduced me to a thrilling world of possibility, the fact of sex as not just a biological event but a broader social phenomenon, one filled with play and creativity. I’m not alone in this: A 2015 survey of Finnish girls found that respondents associated sending “sexual messages” online—including during what some called “pervy roleplay”—with “the freedom of exploration.” The researchers cast it as an extension of the common forms of real-life sexual experimentation that children engage in, like playing “house” or “doctor,” which can be an exploration of “adult interaction, normative social roles, the bodies of others, as well as emotions connected to sexual settings.”
 
My dad, a computer programmer at a startup in Berkeley, brought us online at the beginning of the internet boom—and just as I slid toward puberty. The dining room had recently been converted into “the computer room,” as we called it, which tells you something about the size of these machines and just how excited our family was about this new technology. While my friends were still stuck parsing women’s magazines like YM and Cosmopolitan for intel on sex, I had seemingly limitless knowledge right at my fingertips. This meant discovering a version of what would become Rule 34 of the internet: If you can think of it, someone is into it. Plenty of chat partners described cliché scenes of vanilla romance—beds strewn with rose petals or candle-lit bubble baths—but there were also mentions of everything from threesomes to spankings to golden showers. It was too much information with too little context.
 
On the other hand, my middle school sex-ed class offered a total paucity of information. I heard about the literal ins and outs of sex—here is the urethra, here is the cervix, here's how babies are made. The chief educational aim was avoiding the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Similarly, parental talks about the internet focused on stranger danger and how I might unwittingly stumble across “disturbing videos” (i.e., porn). What we never talked about in class, and what I never heard about at home, was sexual hunger, curiosity, and exploration. In 2013, a study published in the International Journal of Sexual Health found that “adolescents want to learn about sexual experiences, not just sexual health,” and that “the Internet may cater better to adolescents’ sex education interests.”
 
This relates to what researchers have for many decades called the “missing discourse of desire” in sex education, in which girls are cast as potential victims rather than desiring subjects. Of course, the same happens with narratives around the internet, which often emphasize threats while ignoring the possibility of girls’ positive experiences with virtual sexual experimentation. The authors of that Finnish study found that “survey respondents recounted online sexual peer play with fondness, generally detached it from notions of harm, and described it as fun flirtation–as ‘harmless exploration of sexuality and release in writing.’”
 
Online, my younger self found, there was no missing discourse of desire. It was alive and wild—at turns surprising, revolting, arousing, hilarious, and thrilling. Which version was a truer representation, a better education? The internet seemed the most honest teacher available to me.
 
Around the same time, I started a website and daily email newsletter for fans of Leonardo DiCaprio, who had just starred in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. I gathered Leo gossip, sightings, and fan fiction for the newsletter, which gained dozens, hundreds, and then over 1,000 subscribers. Here was a world of my own making, my own desire. I even downloaded audio clips from the Romeo + Juliet website so that whenever an error on my computer occurred, Leo yelled, “I am fortune's fool!” Against this backdrop of obsessive romanticism, I ramped up the cybersex. This was the paradox of my coming of age in the '90s: Quoting Shakespeare by day, faking virtual orgasms by night.
 
It pains me to think of just how early my sexuality coalesced around performing pleasure—even on the internet, where you could, ostensibly, be anyone you wanted to be. At the same time, I was meaningfully trying on different sexual roles while beginning to observe my own bodily responses. That pubescent girl clacking on the keyboard was slowly and indirectly finding the way to her own desires. It would take decades for me to arrive there in any meaningful sense, but “the net,” as I unironically called it, cracked the back door. It’s where I first caught a glimpse inside.
 
Now I’m a mom of a toddler. My child’s internet will be vastly different from the one that ushered me into puberty. Social media, tube sites, virtual reality! About all this, I could easily wring my hands or grumble, “Back in my day …” It all makes AOL chatrooms seem quaint. One thing remains persistently true, though: Adults lose all credibility when they start from a point of ignoring young people’s desire for sexual information and exploration. That fact applies to the dialup days as much as to the OnlyFans era. Luckily, this internet has resources of which I could have only dreamed: robust educational websites like Scarleteen and AMAZE, virtual sex-ed classes with sex-positive, tech-literate educators, and thriving online communities for LGBTQ teens, to name just a few.
 
Even more crucially, the next generation is being raised by parents who are themselves digital natives and therefore less liable to fall for fear-mongering about kids on the internet. Some of these parents know firsthand what young people want to know and experience when it comes to sex online—the harder part is accepting it. Ironically, the worst of parental fears about the influence of the internet are counterbalanced by this acceptance. It normalizes sexual curiosity while paving the way for ongoing talks that contextualize what young people will find online. This casts the internet as just one source of information for teenagers, rather than the only seemingly honest sex educator available to them. I’m most encouraged by knowing that many parents now share my fraught, giddy nostalgia about their own early encounters with sex online—because that common ground is where meaningful understanding and conversation can begin.
 
Adapted from: Want Me, by Tracy Clark-Flory, published by Penguin Books.
 
What My Dialup Youth Taught Me About Sex and the Internet. By Tracy Clark-Flory. Wired, February 16, 2021.

I was in a warehouse in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, anxiously scribbling in my reporter’s notebook while waiting for a porn shoot to begin.

 
Charles Dera, a performer with jet-black hair and a well-groomed beard to match, crouched in front of me, stretching his calves. Tommy Gunn, a performer named after his biceps, sat on the floor flipping through a release form. He hopped to a stand and asked to borrow my pen.
 
As a journalist, I had been on porn sets more times than I can count, but this shoot was making me uncharacteristically nervous.
 
I started looking at porn as a teenager in the late 1990s, using a spotty dial-up connection. It seemed a vibrant human sexuality textbook next to lackluster sex-ed classes featuring black-and-white anatomy diagrams and condoms rolled on to bananas. When I started actually having sex, porn became my aspirational guide to seductive moans and technique. One person I watched in those days was Tommy Gunn, who was now standing next to me, handing back my pen. That explains the anxious scribbles: I was starstruck.
 
Then I heard something that yanked me from my distracted state: “Girls these days.” Girls. These. Days. Three such innocuous words, until they are strung together in that particular order.
 
“Girls watch our porn, because it’s free everywhere, and then they grow up thinking that’s what sex is,” said Dera. “They go and have sex with a normal dude,” Dera continued, “and he’s like –” he screwed up his face in mock horror – the kind of face, actually, that women give in those tube site ads where they’re surprised by a home intruder or snooping stepdad.
 
Gunn nodded knowingly. “When I have my private sex, I’m not trying to be like, ‘Huh-huh-huh,’” he said, theatrically grunting while aggressively humping the air. It was a parody of the work he’s done for well over a decade. Here, one of my unwitting, de facto sex educators seemed to be saying that what looks like great sex on screen doesn’t necessarily make for great sex. He was suggesting that porn is an inaccurate representation of what many straight men want. In fact, his co-star was saying that women like me, who grew up “thinking that’s what sex is”, horrify “normal” dudes.
 
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard these messages, nor would it be the last. Hahaha, girls these days. I had to admit, there was something darkly funny about the suggestion that my sexuality had been shaped by an illusion. And yet through watching and reporting on that “illusion”, I was introduced to a vital truth: sexual fantasy can be a route of exploration and revelation. It was a path to myself.
 
 
My first introduction to porn was in middle school watching the “scrambled channel” to catch the few split seconds when the static morphed into a bare butt thrusting. Then I started exploring the explicit porn sites of the era, which were cheekily crude and ceaselessly alliterative. By the time I graduated high school, I used my meager salary from a part-time job to subscribe to Vivid.com, the premier porn site of the time. I worshiped performers like Jenna Jameson, finding inspiration in their ravenous enthusiasm, which seemed to turn men into puddles of desperation. Officially, I thought of watching porn less as entertainment than instruction, an investigation into men’s desire more than my own.
 
Now I know this is typical. Studies have found that young women often describe their engagement with porn as educational, a useful tool for examining what heterosexual men want from them, while “simultaneously distancing themselves from revealing too intimate a knowledge of it in ways that might mark them as strange and perverse”, as the researcher Alanna Goldstein wrote. This is in part a reflection of feminine sexual norms around being desired rather than desiring.
 
In my emerging sex life, I took inspiration from what I’d seen on my computer screen – not just in porn, but also mainstream TV and films. I enacted a fantasy of men’s supreme desirability and sexual competence. Porn just provided the explicit inspiration for these performances, which led one of my sexual partners to exclaim, “I feel like I’m a teenager discovering Playboy for the first time. No, make that Penthouse.”
 
Meanwhile, I faked nearly all of my orgasms.
 
Except for the ones I had by myself–while “investigating men’s desire”.
 
Lately, the concept of teaching “porn literacy” has gained some buzz. The idea being that young people need to be taught to critically consume pornography as they might any other entertainment medium. This sounds like a solution to the purported problem of young people growing up watching porn and, in Dera’s words, “thinking that’s what sex is”. Indeed, when I first stumbled across the idea, I thought: brilliant, yes, let’s talk to teenagers about porn.
 
In practice, it’s more complicated.
 
A recent paper found that porn literacy is often framed as young people’s “ability to critically read porn as negative and comprising ‘unrealistic’ portrayals of sex”, where only “conservative ideals of ‘good’, coupled and vanilla sex” are cast as “realistic”. In these cases, the goal is less to foster a thoughtful, nuanced engagement with porn, but rather to reject the medium as “fake”.

 
Consider a 2018 New York Times feature on a porn literacy program in Boston. In a class exercise, students were asked to imagine a reality TV competition in which they are required to “kneel on the ground while someone poured a goopy substance over your face”. This scenario was meant to represent similar acts in porn.
 
The teacher wanted to know: just how much money would these teenagers have to be paid for these gross-out tasks before they were willing to compete? The questionable lesson here – aside from moralizing around sexual behaviors that many people genuinely enjoy – appears to be that the performers on screen do it for much less.
 
That isn’t a nuanced lesson around the production of fantasy fodder, but rather performs its own shame theater. It perpetuates “whore stigma”, a term used to describe the societal dishonor placed on sex workers and non–sex workers alike, for stepping outside the bounds of accepted sexual behavior, as the journalist Melissa Gira Grant explains in Playing the Whore.
 
Too often, ostensibly progressive attempts at educating young people around porn replicate this dynamic, casting performers as abject and worthy of pity. What’s more, it reproduces what the anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called the “charmed circle”, which casts as “normal” sex that is private, heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative and non-commercial.
 
This is counter to the compelling and undeniable truth offered up by porn: sex can be a great many things.
 
While diving into the emerging sphere of piracy-fueled tube sites, I discovered a host of idiosyncratic fictionalized scenarios that made my insides move: masseurs who unexpectedly slipped their oiled-up hands between women’s legs and beer-bellied men posing as Hollywood directors to trick women into casting-couch sex.
 
At the time, I was working as a feminist blogger and I struggled with the fact that these fictionalized videos eroticized the kind of real-world abuses that I railed against in my writing. But it became clear to me that the things that oppress or offend us in real life can be what titillate us most in the make-believe realm of fantasy. I realized that the only contradiction to my feminist beliefs was that I was not paying for my porn.
 

Subscribing to sites of the indie, feminist, queer and kinky variety, I latched on to women performers who portrayed sex as a weird, messy and sometimes deeply un-pretty affair. It was a model for what mutually attentive and enthusiastic sex might look like. But they also played with power dynamics, moving between submission and dominance. It felt to me like cathartic drama.
 
Men and their desires had been the focus of my amused, occasionally horrified attention, but now I was riveted by my own. How many different doors could I walk through? What dusty, dimly lit rooms might I discover? I’d taken the master key and was eager to unlock every hidden corner.
 
In the process, I was getting to know my body. More than anything, though, I was becoming familiar with my own mind.
 
It goes without saying: as I was growing up, no one had talked to me about the sexual politics of power, performance and perspective. No one – not my parents, not my sex ed classes, not the writers of glossy magazine sex advice – had bothered to go beyond basic mechanics and technique. A true sexual education has less to do with diagrams of the human reproductive system than with understanding another organ: the brain.
 
Sex could be creative, fun and theatrical, it turned out. It was more than just nerve endings, blood flow and muscle contractions; it was more than angles, friction and rhythm. The physical and psychological experiences of sex were inseparable. Every act was embedded with social and political meaning, and porn let me examine that meaning from a safe and comfortable distance, while alone in my bedroom.
 
It would be a long time before I felt as free to explore my own desire and pleasure in my partnered sex life.

 For all the talk of young people misinterpreting porn, fully grown adults routinely fail to grasp the distinction between fantasy and reality, or else fear the power of the former. Nowhere is that more evident than the current resurgence of morally and religiously motivated attacks on porn that some have described as a “holy war”, and which have been devastating for sex workers.
 
The porn industry has been attacked for decades, in part under the premise that what one watches, the fantastical scenarios that one entertains, will influence behavior to disastrous, and even criminal, ends. Years of research have failed to produce sound evidence of a link between explicit material and sexual aggression. This hasn’t stopped anti-porn conservatives from declaring the existence of sexually explicit films a “public health crisis”.
 
Fictionalized scenarios of coercion or abuse, from casting couch to faux-incest films, are argued without actual evidence to encourage the real thing. Meanwhile, when porn performers speak out about the very real problem of nonconsensual porn proliferating on monopolistic websites, or on-set abuses within the industry, they are routinely ignored.
 
Often, sex workers are discouraged from speaking out to begin with, “for fear that our opponents will use our trauma against us to further crack down on our industry”, as Selena the Stripper writes in the new anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival.

 
Indeed, these concerns are taken more seriously when promoted by groups bent on the outright eradication of porn – and the collapsing of all nuance around fantasy and reality, not to mention sex work and trafficking. As Lorelei Lee wrote in N+1 of this mindset: “All sex trading is understood as trafficking and our ability to consent does not exist.”
 
Interestingly, researchers have proposed that individuals’ perceptions of problematic porn usage – including self-described feelings of addiction – can stem from viewers’ conflicted feelings of moral disapproval.
 
Fantasies themselves are often driven by moral prohibition. In his survey of thousands of Americans, the Kinsey Institute researcher Justin Lehmiller found that some of the most common sexual reveries involved themes of multiple partners, power, taboo and erotic flexibility. “To me, this collection of themes suggests that the American id is primarily characterized by desires to break free from cultural norms and sexual restraints,” he writes in his book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life, noting that the majority of Americans are brought up with narrow and idealized notions of heterosexual, monogamous, cisgender, procreative sex.
 
Fantasies are an escape hatch – and so much more. They can symbolically process hopes and fears, pleasure and trauma, like only the richest of dreams. They certainly can’t be interpreted literally or predictably.
 
The therapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, calls fantasy the “central agent of the erotic”, noting that it can “connect us to hope, playfulness, and mystery”. She goes so far as to write: “I believe, if we didn’t have fantasy, we couldn’t live.”
 
In my mid-20s, I was reassigned to officially cover the sex beat. It was what I was already finding excuses to do: write about sex – but, really, porn.
 
Off-camera, outside the frame of fantasy, there were solicitous assistants equipped with gloved hands and a squirt bottle of lube. There were tables laid out with wet wipes, hand sanitizer, moisturizer, hair ties and an assortment of trail mix and granola bars. There were the sober contracts detailing the parameters of consent.
 
Over the years, I found that the most thrilling on-set moments were revelations of the details omitted from the idealized, fantastical frame: when co-stars negotiated their likes and dislikes off camera, a performer paused to request for lube, the photographer politely asked for a body part to be moved for a better composition, or laughter exploded at the awkwardness of improvising positions in a five-person scene.
 
The revelations of these behind-the-scenes details have often felt to me like watching a heart-racing action movie sequence slowly dissolve into green screen. Typically, it’s these staged aspects of porn that are used to dichotomously cast it as “unrealistic” as opposed to “realistic”, “bad” versus “good”. For me, these behind-the-scenes moments make a wholly different point about the power of fantasy. It can be a realm filled with pressure, expectation and misdirection – but fantasy, especially when it is understood and celebrated as such, can also be a realm of release and rapture, intimacy and self-discovery.
 
That “girls these days” conversation on set came in the midst of my ongoing education around porn. After Gunn finished his comedic air-humping, talk turned to a reminiscence of the porn of yore: pin-ups, VHS tapes, the X-rated pics of the early internet. “You could trade anything for a nudie mag,” said Dera. A couple of other men on set had joined in. Everyone wanted to talk about their early encounters with fantasy fodder. I mentioned the scrambled channel and, although we were a multi-generational group, there was a collective enthusiastic shouting of, “Yeah!”
 
In that moment of shouting, I suspect we all remembered feeling the spark of discovery, the introduction to fantasy, the opening of a new sexual dimension, the revelation that there was more to the act than black-and-white anatomy diagrams and condoms rolled on to bananas. I wondered what it might have meant for me to get greater context around sexual fantasy decades earlier – not just in a high school class, but ongoingly in a culture that allowed for nuanced, expansive discussions of sex. What might it have meant to feel free to pursue porn for my own pleasure from the very beginning, instead of framing it as an education in giving pleasure to men?
 
My career, even well into my 30s, has often been an exercise in trying to make up for that inadequate education, that woeful backdrop. Many people never get to fill in those gaps.
 
An adapted excerpt from Want Me, by Tracy Clark-Flory, published by Penguin Books.
 
 
My porn life: what my years as a sex writer taught me about my desires. By Tracy Clark-Flory. The Guardian, February 16, 2021.  

As I took in the rows of heads mounted on the wall, my first impression was that I’d stepped into a hunting lodge – only these trophies bore a high-sheen of lip gloss and teased hair. Their static eyes trained on a middle distance, save for one pair, set in an Angelina Jolie-lookalike face, that seemed to be staring right at me. I smiled awkwardly, as if to say “hello”, then quickly stepped away from its lifeless gaze.
 
I was in the lobby of the sex doll manufacturer RealDoll, beside a pair of busty life-size models propped up by metal stands. This was about what I expected from my visit to the company’s San Diego headquarters: improbable physiques incapable of standing on their own.
 
As a teenager in the late 1990s, I’d snuck nighttime episodes of HBO’s edgy documentary series Real Sex and caught one featuring RealDoll’s founder, Matt McMullen, and his factory of fantasy. RealDoll offered sculpted silicone perfection, Barbie-like proportions, and lips parted as if in a perpetual moan. Fourteen-year-old me watched McMullen confidently state: “We can build your dream girl for you.” This is what straight men desire, I thought.
 
Nearly two decades later, my visit as a reporter to the RealDoll headquarters felt like a personal pilgrimage. It was January of 2017 and Donald Trump had just been sworn into office after bragging about his ability to “grab” women by the “pussy”. It seemed to me that the market for these inanimate bodies was a reflection of a similar kind of sexual entitlement and blithe objectification of women. RealDoll primarily sells quote-unquote “female” dolls to men, with its “male” models accounting for only 10% of its sales. Annually, the company sells roughly 350 to 400 dolls starting at around $6,000 a piece.
 
But then my tour guide, a woman with warm eyes and a kind smile, caught me off guard. Sometimes, she said, customers request bespoke faces based on the countenance of a deceased spouse. She promptly waved me on, but I paused in place, gazing at the heads. Grieving widowers was not something I expected to find here. Maybe I should have known better.
 
I’m a journalist who writes about sex, and my work routinely complicates stereotypic assumptions about straight men’s sexuality. Of course, I’ve come up against plenty of the predictable tropes I anticipated as an HBO-watching teenager, but I’ve more often found that men defy the cliche of superficial, unemotional wanting. Whether interviewing men about their intimate lives or answering reader questions for a sex advice column, I have routinely encountered tenderness, vulnerability and anxiety.
 
The same proved true of my RealDoll visit, which at nearly every turn underscored the unexpected around heterosexual men’s desire.
 
A familiarity with the early history of sex dolls might have lessened my surprise. In the 19th century, European sailors availed themselves of cloth dolls known as dames de voyage, as Hallie Lieberman reports in Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy. In the 1960s, scientists brought a pair of plastic blow-up dolls nicknamed Antarctica 1 and Antarctica 2 to the Showa research station on East Ongul Island. Later, according to Lieberman, an inflatable doll without orifices named Judy was sold in Japan “as a ‘loving companion’ who could accompany men on rides in their convertible or recline on the couch, sipping martinis”.
 
Historically, sex dolls have been associated with loneliness. That theme has remained, even as cloth and plastic have given way to hyperreal silicon models. Some RealDoll customers are married and looking for a menage a trois, free from the messiness of added human feeling, but many others are recently single, divorced or widowed. McMullen says some customers simply lack the social skills to maintain human relationships. Many men assign names, personalities and backstories to their dolls. Hobbyist message boards are infused with romance, including accounts of candlelit dates, feelings of love and the occasional marriage. Sometimes, doll owners share wedding photos, in which they pose with their doll brides, or even exchange vows as a doll maid-of-honor looks on.
 
On the popular online message board Doll Forum, one man writes that, for him, sex dolls tap into his longing for being with “a woman who loves me for me”. Another message board member riffs on the simple companionship they serve: “A doll to sit in an empty chair so you have someone to sit and chat with. A doll to hug and kiss. A doll to share an empty bed with. A doll to love and be loved [by].” I’ve heard similar refrains reporting on another realm of fantasy: porn. Once, while visiting a virtual reality shoot, the director told me that what straight men most want from these immersive point-of-view scenes is cuddling and extended eye contact. They want connection.

 Such accounts fly in the face of stereotypes around heterosexual men’s desire, but so does some of the emerging research on the subject. Not that this is a large field. The assumption that men’s sexuality is relatively straightforward is pervasive, and as a result, much of the contemporary research on the complexity of desire focuses on women.

 In 2001, the sex therapist Rosemary Basson published a model of “responsive desire” that considers the many relational and contextual factors leading to the wish for sex, including emotional satisfaction and intimacy. Her work represents a departure from Masters and Johnson’s bedrock theory of sexual response –excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution – and challenged the concept, and ideal, of sexual desire as a spontaneous urge.

 In the years since, Basson’s work has been widely interpreted as a model for women’s desire, but she never intended it that way. In fact, Ian Kerner, a psychotherapist and sexuality counselor, says it applies to men’s desire as well, which “can be incredibly elastic and variable” and vulnerable to outside stressors. He says men’s desire “is not properly understood or ascribed nearly enough nuance or subtlety”.

 In 2016, a study published in the Journal of Sex Research surveyed straight men in long-term heterosexual relationships about what elicited their desire, and found that key factors included “feeling desired” and “intimate communication”. The experience of rejection and a “lack of emotional connection” notably decreased their interest in sexual intimacy. The researchers concluded that “men’s sexual desire may be more complex and relational” than previously thought.

 One of the study’s researchers, Sarah Hunter Murray of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, went on to publish a book that argues against the popular view that men pursue sex for pleasure alone. “Men want to have sex because they want to feel close and connected,” she writes in Not Always in the Mood: The New Science of Men, Sex, and Relationships. In fact, Murray says that a key component of men’s desire is romance – the lit candles, hand holding and other gestures typically assigned to women.

 When my RealDoll tour proceeded beyond the lobby and into the workshop where they manufacture these forms designed to gratify longing, I was met by dozens of silicone heads sitting on sticks awaiting makeup: gaping eye sockets, slack mouths and flat, chalky skin. A work desk was equipped with palettes of shimmery powder in jewel tones. Customers can choose from a rainbow’s array of permanent eyeshadow, lipstick and nail polish, although some prefer to apply makeup to their dolls themselves. Owners select and style wigs, collect jewelry and accessories, and maintain dynamic wardrobes ranging from frilly negligees to power suits, purchased from women’s clothing outlets. I realized, eyeing those shimmery palettes, that sex dolls allow owners to not only play with femininity but also defy that early childhood directive, “dolls are for girls”.

 Back on the message boards I found owners broadcasting the results of elaborate amateur photo shoots showing dolls sweeping kitchen floors in a T-shirt and panties, snowboarding in sporty getups, lounging poolside in string bikinis, or frolicking through fields of flowers. Some owners role play as their own silicone companions, narrating X-rated tales of passion and pleasure, which often highlight their own sensual attentiveness.

 It reminded me of previous journalistic encounters with sexual playfulness and imagination. In 2016, I attended SizeCon, a fetish convention in New York City for people – although it was overwhelmingly men – with fantasies involving shrinking and inflation. Participants could don VR headsets for a simulation of being popped into a woman’s mouth like a piece of popcorn or pose against a greenscreen so that they could be photoshopped on to a cityscape à la Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

 While there, I spoke with a young guy who shared a childhood memory of seeing little girls gathered on the playground around a ladybug. They warned him away, yelling that he would kill it. “They made me feel like a monster, and I hated that,” he said. “I remember feeling, like, I wish I was the ladybug.” Now he fantasized about being shrunk to miniature and kept in a jar at a couple’s bedside.

 Experts maintain that sexual fantasies can serve a deep psychological purpose. The psychologist Michael Bader describes them as “vehicles by which our minds counteract the chilling effect of feelings of guilt, worry, shame, rejection, and helplessness and make it safe enough to experience pleasure”. Sexual desire, he writes in his 2010 book, Male Sexuality: Why Women Don’t Understand It – And Men Don’t Either, is often defined by unconscious attempts to address feelings of loneliness and rejection. He notes that many straight men fantasize about women who seem “to exist primarily to sexually service men and derive tremendous pleasure themselves from the effort to do so”. Bader argues that these fantasies arouse men not because they facilitate misogyny but because they allow men to counter pervasive beliefs, “for example, that women don’t enjoy sex, don’t enjoy pleasing men, and easily feel disappointed or hurt by men pursuing their own interests”.

 Bader suggests that the relationship between men’s desires and their sexual preferences may not lend itself to superficial interpretations. He cites, for instance, “men who like to dominate in order to transcend feelings of helplessness” and men who like “to be dominated so as to not feel guilty and responsible”. Sometimes, Bader writes, men who have developed a sense of guilt toward women, “solve” this dilemma through objectifying women and divorcing sex from intimacy. Kerner, the psychotherapist and author of the upcoming Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex, says that in his clinical practice men who have experienced this fracture are often trying to reintegrate sex and intimacy. In other words, they crave more than unadorned physicality. “The idea that men can just have sex for the sake of sex and get enough out of it is a fallacy,” he says.

 On the RealDoll website, customers can choose from seventeen different body types with cup sizes from 32A to 32F. There were nearly a dozen different kinds of labia on offer, ranging from ruffled to barely there. The sheer variety of idealized body parts was dizzying, as were the surprisingly niche options on display in the workshop itself, which were the result of custom requests. Bumpy nipples? Handlebar mustache pubes?

 I thought of my teenage self, the girl who had evaluated her own body in much the same way the RealDoll website atomizes its dolls for consumption. I appraised myself against what I believed to be a generalizable model of straight men’s desire. By contrast, RealDoll’s very emphasis on customization belies the concept of a singular, universally agreed-upon ideal.

 
Of course, the glossy photos featured on RealDoll’s website do not advertise the true range of men’s desires, those bumpy nipples or mustache pubes. Instead, it hews to a marketable “dream girl” aesthetic: perky breasts, pouty lips, “shaved” pubes, flat tummies and tiny waists. Most read as white. It’s often said that the risque Bild Lilli – the miniature German adult novelty doll from the 1950s – was the precursor to Barbie, that infamous totem of impossible physique. As with countless commercial domains, RealDoll is a factory that produces, perhaps even more than it satisfies, straight men’s wants.
 
There is longing for an ideal – and then there is entitlement to it. The latter is what came to mind as I stepped into RealDoll’s basement where naked, headless figures hung suspended by metal chains from the wood-beamed ceiling. It was hard to see these dangling forms as objects of reverence, let alone romantic companions, and I realized there is no reckoning with this industry without acknowledging that, for some owners, dolls are a surrogate for dominance.
 
The market for sex dolls in the United States emerged alongside the sexual revolution wherein women claimed new freedoms in their intimate lives. To an unprecedented although still limited degree, women could choose to both pursue and decline sexual encounters. Sex dolls were billed as solace “for all the lonely guys that weren’t getting laid”, as Lieberman reports in her history of sex toys. “Blow-up dolls returned the new sexually autonomous woman to male control,” Lieberman writes. “A blow-up doll is always ready for sex, never talks about her rights, and always looks perky.”

 
Decades later, women’s sexual autonomy remains a contentious subject, as #MeToo and embattled debates surrounding consent make clear. In the extreme, online enclaves of misogyny blame women’s liberation for sexually disenfranchising men. Elliot Rodger’s 2014 shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, is a devastating example of how entitlement can become brutality. Rodger belonged to a growing online community of men who identify as involuntary celibates, or “incels”. There are also voluntary celibates, or “volcels”, and Men Going Their Own Way, or “MGTOW”, who have resolved to distance themselves from women, who they view as debased and morally corrupt.
 
On doll forums, it’s easy to stumble across similarly sexist attitudes. One message board commenter writes of how his doll is modeled after his ex-girlfriend who, “though wonderful in many ways, also drove me crazy, cheated on me and made me consider murder/suicide”. There are many accounts of human exes who are “nuts”, “evil”, or stole a man’s money. “You won’t have any of this shit happening with your doll,” writes one poster. “Sure, she might drain your bank account, but she got YOU to pull the trigger on that one, buddy.”
 
The potential for being made a fool is a recurrent theme in well-considered writing on straight men’s sexuality. The researcher Brené Brown maintains that men learn early on that they are responsible for initiating sex and that “sexual rejection soon becomes the hallmark of masculine shame”. One of the therapists she quotes in her book, Daring Greatly, asserts, “I guess the secret is that sex is terrifying for most men.”
 
New York sex therapist Stephen Snyder observes that in heterosexual couples, it’s usually the man, counter to popular expectation, who has lost his desire – or, as he puts it, “gone missing in the bed”. (Typically, the man is still masturbating privately, so it’s only his desire within the context of the relationship that is lost.) Snyder, the author of Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Long-Lasting Relationship, often asks these clients whether they touch their partner’s body for her pleasure or for their own. His clients answer, “For hers, of course. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
 
Snyder suspects that a contributing factor with these men “gone missing” is that “gender roles are changing, and men aren’t sure exactly who they’re supposed to be in bed”. We live in a time of vital reckoning over sexual abuse and emerging awareness around how women’s pleasure is routinely neglected in heterosexual sex. The men who land on Snyder’s couch often struggle with a sexual selflessness that saps their desire. Sometimes, he says, men who have grown up with a domineering father overcompensate, and in the process they disconnect from their own wants. The trick for these men, is to find “the right balance between passion and consideration – self and other.”
 
At the end of my RealDoll tour, I was brought into a laboratory to talk with the company’s founder, Matt McMullen. A long table was scattered with doll heads. On the walls, incomprehensible scribblings overtook whiteboards. In one corner was the soon-to-be released sex robot, named Harmony, wearing a deep-cut outfit that revealed her ample breasts. Underneath her silky red wig was a clear dome of multi-colored wires. Mounted in the background, a painting depicted a naked robot in the deep embrace of a man dressed in a lab coat.
 
McMullen, the same man I’d watched decades ago talking about building to the specification of men’s fantasies, gazed down at a computer-generated woman on his iPad. “She’ll ask you questions,” he said. “She’ll remember your hopes and dreams.”
 
This was RealDoll’s artificial intelligence app, which allows users to engage in basic conversation with the digitized and fully customizable woman on-screen. Soon, the same app would allow customers to interact with Harmony, which is essentially one of their old-fashioned dolls outfitted with a moving mouth. McMullen explained that the AI, whether used as a standalone app or with the robot, works like a Tamagotchi, that egg-shaped virtual pet from the 1990s. If you fail to interact with it, the program’s “social meter” declines. Similarly, a “love meter” rises if you give the AI compliments and express emotions – say, mentioning that you enjoy spending time with “her”.
 
This design choice is a moral one, McMullen explained. He wants to teach people to be better humans. “We want to be able to simulate the kindness and the legwork that goes into building a connection.” In this statement, there is a hint of personal pain: “I’ve lived my life and I’ve had my share of relationship entanglements,” he said. “It’s rough out there. People are one thing when you first meet them and they’re something else once you get to know them for a while.” He added after a pause, “With the robot, you can be yourself and just see how that goes.” McMullen describes building a relationship with the robot as a “safe zone”.
 
 
This decision to focus on connection is also the result of what McMullen has learned about his customer base: they crave a “bond”, as he put it. “This is about the mental and emotional interactions that we have with each other,” he said, gesturing around the room at the robot and table scattered with dolls’ heads. “The things that lead up to sex are deeper than just the physical act itself.”
 
Listening to McMullen talk about connection and intimacy, I could feel the pull of an easy answer, a simple conclusion – about sex dolls, about men. Then I watched as he powered up Harmony. Her long-lashed eyes blinked audibly. “Good morning, how can I help you, my sweet Matt?” she asked, glossed lips parting and closing with a mechanical whir. She tilted her head to the side, as if thoughtfully anticipating his response. McMullen asked her the time and she told him with a slight smile.
 
When he thanked her, she replied, “Sure, I was created to please you.”
 
  
Tracy Clark-Flory is the author of Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire, out in February of 2021.
 
 
What I learned about male desire in a sex doll factory. By Tracy Clark-Flory. The Guardian,  October 19, 2020. 

Tracy Clark-Flory was, in many ways, the prototypical millennial feminist. During her early career years as a writer for Salon and later Jezebel, Clark-Flory carved out a name and a reliable beat as a curious, candid chronicler of modern sex culture. The Tracy I knew then was the Tracy who appeared in her frank, refreshingly non-judgmental columns, a woman who could write descriptively about a one night stand with a porn star or the realities of a "friends with benefits" arrangement.

 
The trolls, naturally, howled over her unapologetic daring. What they didn't seem to notice was a human being who was never flippant or cynical, who could also speak eloquently on the illness and eventual devastating loss of a parent. One who has kept her trademark sense of wonder through her new adventures of love, marriage and motherhood.
 
Now, in her debut memoir "Want Me," Clark-Flory widens her scope to look back on the person she was and has become, how she defined her sex life and her sex life defined her. It's rare for an author to approach her younger self with both unflinching candor and genuine self-compassion, but Clark-Flory does just that, as she grapples with the nuanced complexities of feminist ideals and the messiness of real, boots on the ground intimacy. I spoke to Tracy recently via phone about love, grief and faking orgasms.
 
MEW : The best place to start would probably be with the commenters, right? You've lived such a public life, and that has opened you up to a great deal of BS from trolls over the years.
 
TCF : It's actually improved dramatically. Back when I was first at Salon, that was really my initiation into writing about myself online and having anonymous strangers on the internet react to it in very violent and sometimes aggressive and hateful ways. Especially while writing for Broadsheet [Salon's female-centric former vertical], we had our resident anti-feminist trolls. At the time, I was in my early twenties and just having my writing published, period, was quite an experience. But then having my writing published and to have such vitriol in response was remarkable.
 
The way that I coped with it at the time was I tried to laugh about it. I would print out the very worst of the troll comments calling me the worst imaginable names, and I would post them on my fridge like, "Well, this is hilarious. There are these hateful people out there in the world who are so riled up about me making very simple, straightforward arguments about women being equal to men."
 
But there was also an undercurrent. As the years went on, I came to appreciate how not funny it was, and how much that harassment can have very real world implications. The conversation around online commenting and moderation has really changed since then, and so my experience right now is that I've learned to not read the comments. I have fully internalized that lesson and very rarely poke into any comment threads nowadays. I've also found that there's better moderation. But now of course there's Twitter, which is not so fun.
 
MEW : Do you still get lunatics coming at you?
 
TCF : Much less often. There have been times when I've written about figures in the manosphere, and them trying to engage with me on Twitter, that sort of thing. I ignore them and then it goes away. It's actually surprising how it seems to have really quieted down more recently. The thing that's surprising is, with Twitter, you can go viral and create backlash when you least expect it. I got so used to bracing for reaction writing about very controversial things, and then somehow it seems that when you least expect it, when you're not anticipating something to be controversial at all, that's when it blows up in your face.
 
MEW : When you talk in the book about putting the troll stuff on your refrigerator, it feels very consciously part of that larger story of you trying to figure out how to gird yourself from getting hurt. It's "Nothing can hurt me. Go ahead, bring it on."
 
TCF : It wasn't just the troll comments on the fridge, it was a general disposition or way carrying myself. Especially with my interactions with men. It wasn't just these anonymous men online that I was interacting with in this way. It was also the men that I interacted with in my personal life too. It was this protective outlook, a way of wearing my armor.
 
MEW : You talk about the dynamics of male porn stars expressing, "Wait, this isn't what I want; this is just what people expect of me." They don't feel a lot of agency. Similarly, your way of giving yourself agency was by really pushing back, by saying, "Nothing bothers me, nothing gets to me." And getting into some situations that in hindsight you can see were potentially dangerous. Do you think that's uncommon?
 
TCF :  I don't think that's uncommon at all. I had in my early twenties this very defensive posture of, 'I'm down for whatever," which I realize now in retrospect is very protective. In my casual encounters with men, the possibility of assault, for example, did not feel front of mind. Yet because of the realities of being a woman in this world, it was present for me. I think that unconsciously I developed this defensive posture of basically, "I'm down for everything, so nothing can be done against my will." That was my way of protecting myself.
 
In writing this book and reading a lot of more contemporary feminist research, I've realized how much my experiences are really reflective of this neoliberal feminist mentality that emerged in the nineties that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility. It gives women permission to be sexual and avoid some of the usual judgments, as long as they do it with the impression of being in control and going after what they want. That is a terrible setup. It's a setup that, given the current state of things, given the fact of an incomplete sexual revolution, essentially asked women to perform, to act, to play the part of the sexually liberated.

 
MEW : It's a trope, but it's very real. The "cool girl" speech from "Gone Girl" touched a nerve because it's about women going along with something that's kind of crappy,  that's supposedly "empowering."
 
TCF :  It comes down to the fact that women often seek power through men, through being wanted by men, through being desired by them, through being married to them. The same thing happens with sexual desire. Very early on, girls learn that their sexuality is a liability. The developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman has this theory of the dilemma of desire, where young girls come up against their bodily feeling, their sexual feeling, and the real-world material dangers that are associated with their sexuality.
 
As a result, a lot of girls and women become disconnected from their own bodily experience, their own desires, their own wants. It's a very socially acceptable thing to reroute those desires through men, to be wanted by men. That happens in the realm of sex, but also in terms of navigating the world at large, that we hand over our desires to men, that we find satisfaction, that we find power, through being pleasing to men.
 
MEW : The thread that weaves through this whole book is you and the faked orgasm. That is not something that women admit, because it's considered such a failure. There are two aspects of that: There's you as a woman being settling for that, and there's that a lot of men don't seem to care.
 
TCF : I do often wonder about that. Looking back, there was no time when any man was like, "Was that real? Was that authentic?" Or, "Did that feel good?" There was literally never a time, except for maybe later on, in a longer term relationship where there was commitment and real emotional engagement. Aside from that, there was never a time where a man seemed to want to ask any questions about it at all. This does raise the question for me of how much awareness any of these men might have had about authenticity that was present, and whether it was easier, more pleasant, to buy it, to believe it.
 
MEW : There's a statistic you cite in the book about the percent of women who fake it and percent of men who think that a woman's had an orgasm.
 
TCF : Half of women report having faked it, and some research actually puts that number higher. There was a study that found that 95% of straight men reported usually or always having an orgasm when sexually intimate, compared to 65% of hetero women. That's a pretty substantial gap. When you look at straight women versus lesbian women, you see that there isn't the same phenomenon happening. There is something particular to the heterosexual dynamic here.
 
There was a study of thousands of young women in college who are having casual sexual encounters. The researchers concluded that if it was possible — and I love that they said "if it was possible" — to get young men to care more about women's pleasure, and for young women to feel more entitled to sexual pleasure, then that orgasm gap might be closed. I love it was, "if it was possible," as though it some great feat.
 
MEW : A lot of that does come from porn and the ubiquity of porn. Many of us as feminists struggle with, "What are we supposed to feel about porn?" I notice over the past several years, porn has gotten so much more brutal. Tracy, what's up with that?
 
TCF :  t's really tricky. I do relate to that sense of, if you were to log into Pornhub, for example, and just go browsing around, what you would generally see would be very different from what you would see if you had logged in the early 2000s to vivid.com. At the same time, there have been studies that have analyzed these things and have said, "Oh no, porn is not getting rougher." I think often in these conversations, there is research, which is pretty scant, and then there's individual experiences like, "This seems so much more extreme."
 
When I started watching Tube sites in my twenties, my assumption was, "This is a very clear reflection of what straight men most want." That was my engagement with it. Over the years, writing about it, I've come to view it much more as an industry. You can take the example of Netflix. Netflix wants you to keep watching, Netflix wants to keep you engaged. It's not necessarily a pure reflection of what people want. I think that has an impact on the content that you see in porn.
 
I also think the advent of Tube sites, which totally decimated the industry, which totally decimated performers pay, has had a huge impact as well. I've talked to a lot of people in industry who reported how things have shifted, where performance have to move into more, quote unquote, extreme acts, much sooner in their careers that you have to do more for less. There's a lot that's happened to the industry through piracy that has changed the content.
 
MEW : It reminds me the performer you talk to in the book who says something like, "Anal is like a first date now." It feels like both men and women have to do more before they're ready, or if they're ever ready. Whether or not it feels good is almost irrelevant. It makes it harder for people to figure out what they really are into and what feels good.
 

TCF: There's this great example that the performer of Vex Ashley actually made in a scholarly article in the porn studies journal. She was saying, with Hollywood actions films, we might watch a crazy car chase, but then we have the real-world experience of driving around and seeing other human beings driving down the street and not jumping off the freeway. With sex, we might have our own personal individual experiences that fail to meet up to the fantasy realm. But because sex is so rarely talked about, because it's so shrouded in secrecy and taboo, we don't have the firsthand example of other people's experience to compared to our own.
 
The fantastical realm of porn is uniquely unchecked in the real world. The only thing that we can check it against is our own private experience.
 
MEW : I've always said that trying to learn about sex from watching porn is like trying to learn to drive from watching "The Fast and the Furious."
 
TCF : Our culture is totally ignorant around the realm of sexual fantasy. There's this real lack of appreciation and understanding of what sexual fantasies mean, what they don't mean, how they serve us. I think that they're often interpreted fairly literally. There's a real failure to appreciate the world of sexual fantasy is a magical place of pretend and illusion that can address some of our deepest fears and dreams.
 
MEW : You are now in a different stage in life. What do you want now for your life going forward into the next phase? What do you think is possible for women right now?
 
TCF : It's all been about this journey from that sense of "Want me," to more of a sense of, "What do I want?" And so moving towards a more embodied place of being in touch with my own desires, not just sexually, but broadly. There's a lot that happening with this book that speaks to what I want, which is being able to be a mom, being able to be in a married monogamous relationship, and also publish a book like this and to stand by this as this is part of who I am. To be that fully incorporated person who doesn't have to pick one category or the other, and doesn't have to live in with the fractured self, but can have a a more incorporated experience itself.
 
MEW : There's this rising generation of girls and boys coming up behind you, who are part of a different world. Do you think they have an easier time, the same time, a worse time navigating their sexuality in this world right now?
 
TCF : I think that in a lot of ways, things are better. The acceptance and around sexuality, the nuances around identity, the conversations that are happening right now are, without a doubt, major progress. The evolution around attitudes towards sex work, although slow, younger generations are so much further ahead in terms of figuring that stuff out than even my generation. And that's  incredibly positive.
 
One thing that is concerning to me is the fact that this neoliberal feminist narrative that I mentioned has really pushed feminism away from this collective struggle into one of individualistic gain, a "lean in" style feminism tha in the realm of sexual empowerment is really discouraging.
 
I think about young women coming up and continuing to be encouraged to pursue sexual empowerment as though it were an individual job, as though, if you do not feel totally sexually empowered, it is your own fault as opposed to the cultural backdrop. One of the main struggles for me was coming up with that narrative of sexual empowerment. I believed that I could get it right on my own, as opposed to looking at the broader backdrop.
 
One of the greatest lessons from all of the time that I spent writing about sex at Salon, because I so often was interviewing individual people about their sex lives, was how much people keep hidden and how hungry people are for more of a sense of a collective engagement around these topics.
 
It's so easy to feel like, "It's just me." Any time I'm interviewing people about their sex lives, everyone's concerned that they're not normal. Everyone is so exceedingly normal in that sense. We're all so concerned that we're little weirdos, and we're all little weirdos. And how wonderful is that?
 
 
Tracy Clark-Flory: "Our culture is totally ignorant around the realm of sexual fantasy". By  Mary Elizabeth Williams.  Salon, February 22, 2021.