The Philosophy of Sex – Details, episodes & analysis

In 2018, the sex toy company Dame decided to advertise in the New York City subway, run by the MTA. 

In September, the MTA's ad agency, Outfront Media, began working with Dame on a campaign that would run in subway cars, showcasing sex toys against neutral backgrounds and featuring slogans that read, “Toys, for sex” and customer reviews.

By late November of that year, however—after Dame says it spent significant money revising and developing ads in an attempt to meet the ad agency's suggestions for approval—the MTA completely and abruptly changed course on Dame's campaign, as well as all other sex toy ads on public transit. The MTA rejected Dame's ad campaign, and publicly published guidelines on advertising that prohibited any “sexually oriented business" from advertising on MTA property.

Meanwhile, ads for viagra and other erectile dysfunction products continued to grace the eyes of countless New York commuters, with no questions asked. So in 2019, Dame sued the MTA for the arbitrary censorship they had experienced. 

This story demonstrates the countless hurdles and discrimination companies within the sex industry face in trying to market and discuss their products.  Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok or billboards, talking about sex and pleasure in a frank and open way on the internet, and in the real world, is extremely difficult.

Alexandra Fine, the Founder of Dame, has navigated these challenges in many creative ways. After graduating with her master's in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University in New York, Alexandra founded Dame Products alongside engineer Janet Lieberman in 2014 with a line of vibrators aimed at closing the "pleasure gap."

Since then, Dame has raised upwards of $11 million and run a number of successful crowdfunding campaigns, leveraging platforms such as Indigogo and Kickstarter. At the company's helm, Alexandra possesses the resilience and energy required to bring light to an industry that many are attempting to hide. 

In this episode, Alexandra and Caroline discuss the various hurdles sex companies face, particularly when it comes to marketing and fundraising. Alexandra shares her experience suing the MTA and advocating for change within the industry. 

Learn more about here Dame here.

Follow Alexandra here. 

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Today’s guest is Dr Avgi Skatepolou, author of “Sexuality Beyond Consent; Risk, Race and Traumatophilia”. 

Avgi maintains that society has become overly focused on healing trauma and needs to reroute its attention to what subjects do with their trauma. She calls attention to a series of challenging questions: Why is sexuality beyond consent worth risking, and how does risk become a way of engaging with the opaque parts of ourselves? And in what ways does eliminating risk remove the potential for erotic transformation?  

Agvi draws unexpected links between ideas that are so often seen at odd within one another; cruelty and care, sadism and ethics, trauma and expansion, and perversion and purity. Avgi writes about ideas typically relegated to the morbid, dark and unspeakable and sheds light on their potentially transformative powers, something she refers to as ‘erotic astonishment.’   

Blending philosophy, queer theory, and race theory with her extensive experience in practice as an analyst, she proposes that accepting the strange within, not to master trauma but to rub against it, may open people up to encounters with the enigmatic, astounding and unique forms of care.  

Buy ‘Sexuality Beyond Consent’ here. 

Follow Avgi here. 

Contact us 

info@becuming.me

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Welcome to The Philosophy of Sex. Today we’re talking about consent. The idea of affirmative consent first attracted attention in the early 1990s. Since then, consent laws have been passed in a number of countries. Alongside legislation, women are often told to know what they want and know how to communicate this to their partners. While women asserting their pleasure sounds positive, it assumes communication guarantees safety and that a satisfying experience will follow. But might the pressure to give a fully formed and enthusiastic ‘yes’, be at odds with the ability to take risks and explore sexually? 

If we look at the dominant culture around sex, in recent years, two requirements have emerged for good sex: consent and self-knowledge. This seems like progress. It takes women at their word and defuses the potential for sexual violence. But does conceit of absolute clarity place the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour?

In this episode, Caroline speaks with Katherine Angel to unpack the shortcomings of affirmative consent, 

Katherine is a writer and academic. She directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck University of London, where she teaches fiction, non-fiction, and critical work relating to sexuality, feminism, gender, and psychoanalysis. 

Katherine has a PhD in the history of psychiatry and sexuality from the University of Cambridge. She’s held multiple fellowships at academic institutions in Europe, the US and the UK, including Harvard and the University of London's Centre for the History of Emotions. Her research into 'female sexual dysfunction', American psychiatry,  sexology, and feminism has been published in journals including the History of the Human Sciences, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Current Opinion in Psychiatry. 

From ‘No means No’ to #MeToo, Katherine shares her thoughts on consent and the complexities of female desire. A heads up that sexual violence, rape and assault are discussed during the episode, but no specific details are included. 

Resources:

Check out Katherine’s work here.

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me. 

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On the face of it, the sex industry appears to be a sex-positive haven. Growing rapidly, it's become a highly competitive industry and an attractive investment opportunity for those with a buck or many to spare. However, with this comes the expected; individuals willing to put profit over honesty and integrity. Despite appearances, the sex toy industry in Australia and elsewhere is hugely male-dominated. Greenwashing is quickly becoming part of the industry's rhetoric. Social ideas, like feminism, are being co-opted for marketing purposes by companies who appear to be doing less than walking the talk.

Layer on top of this the unregulated nature of the industry, and you have a recipe for attracting cowboys by the dozen. 

Selling sex toys is about more than selling pink dildos, sexual wellness and female empowerment. The idea of this being all it takes feels pretty outdated. 

No one is better placed to comment on these issues than Alisha Williams, the founder of Rosewell. Rosewell is a sex care brand based in Brisbane, Australia. Alisha started the company roughly three years ago, and the brand has become hugely popular. I'm constantly impressed by the level of knowledge and care that go into Rosewell products, particularly in their manufacturing and supply chain processes. 

In this episode, Alisha and I share our experiences working in the sex industry in Australia. We discuss what it's like working as two young women in a male-dominated industry, the social implications of branding and the current ethical plights of the sex industry.

If you'd like to learn more about these issues, I'd recommend listening to our episode on sex toys from season one. 

Resources:

Rosewell products: Rosewell

Follow Rosewell on Instagram 

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me. 

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Have you ever thought about the relationship between time and pleasure? Sex and pleasure are temporal experiences, meaning how we relate to time can impact how frequently we experience pleasure both while we’re having sex, and when we’re not. 

As Philosopher Willam James suggested, time is something we can sense. “A day full of excitement will pass ‘ere we know it.’ On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity.” 

Our consciousness is like a stream that can include, past, present and future sensations at any given moment. Our perception of time is dependent on our flow of consciousness; whether we are attached to what was, living in the moment, or are in anticipation. 

If we are in a constant state of distraction, experiencing pleasure will be extremely difficult. In a world where pressure on our pace of living and attention is seemingly ever-increasing, connecting with pleasures past, present, and future can be extremely difficult.

These concepts can be seemingly esoteric. But as this week’s guest, embodiment and somatics coach, Euphemia Russell reminds us, by understanding how we relate to time and spaciousness, we’re able to cultivate more pleasure in our lives. 

You might’ve heard Euphemia in our previous episodes. This week, we invited Euphemia back to unpack the themes of their new book, like what a pleasure spectrum is and how to cultivate pleasure and connection as individuals, and as a community. Euphemia talks about exploring the depths and boundaries of your pleasure. We also answer some guest questions about embodiment. 

Euphemia grapples with any of the harder-to-grasp elements of sex and sexuality and shines a light on the importance of reconceiving pleasure as not just something we experience during sex, but something that is available to us in unexpected moments.

You can find Euphemia’s book, Slow Pleasure here.

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me. 

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It’s likely that at some point, you’ve found your morals have felt incongruent with a sexual scenario you’ve found yourself in. While this can feel pretty blindsiding, what would it mean to stop and think about it? Damon Young is an award-winning philosopher and author of “On Getting Off”, a book about sex and philosophy. In the book, Damon urges us to grapple with the complexity of sex in an honest and self-deprecating way. In this episode, Damon and Caroline discuss what it means to think about sex, the importance of humour in the bedroom, and embracing the ethical dilemmas sex gives rise to. Find “On Getting Off” and Damon’s other works here.

Recommendations from Damon:

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 

Irving Singer, Sex

David Halperin, ‘What is Sex For?’, Critical Inquiry 43 (2016).

Anna Clark, Desire: A History of Human Sexuality

Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Metaphysics of Sexual Love’, in The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2

Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic’ in Sister Outsider 

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties.

Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox.

Milan Kundera, ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ in

Laughable Loves. 

James Baldwin, Another Country 

Sharon Olds, The Connisuers of Slugs

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

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Gloryholes have long been associated with gay culture. As a great way to maintain anonymity in contexts where gay sex is illegal or socially unacceptable, they come from a history of persecution. 

However, they're certainly not a new thing. There is evidence Gloryholes existed in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Japan, before being exported to Europe in the 1700s. Given their history of concealment, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Vatican city has one of the largest numbers of glory holes per capita. Gloryholes are a fantastic example of how social ideas influence human sexual behaviour. 

Emil is a Filipino-Australian artist, sex worker and HIV + health educator who, in 2021, began operating a glory hole as part of their art practice. Emil's work sits delicately at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, art, and unashamedly being a slut. Their work is subversive, clever and sexy.

In this episode, Emil and Caroline discuss navigating gender and power dynamics in sex, being a generous lover, and how engaging in alternative sexual practices can support sexual healing. 

You can find Emil on Instagram at @babydilfx. You won't regret following them. 

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me. 

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Welcome to The Philosophy of Sex, long-play. This week, we’re speaking with Janet Hardy from the sixth episode of season 1 ‘Hardcore tenderness. Reinterpreting what we think about kink and BDSM.’ 

Janet W. Hardy is the author or co-author of thirteen books about alternative sexuality, including the groundbreaking bestseller The Ethical Slut. She is also the Founder of the Greenery Press, a publishing house based in California, specialises in books on BDSM and polyamory, with over 50 titles in print.

Janet is an experienced BDSM practitioner and she’s been educating people from across the globe on how to engage in BDSM and polyamory for over 20 years. Much of Janet’s work has contributed hugely to establishing a gold standard in behaviour within BDSM and polyamorous communities. And while her work focuses on BDSM and kink, I believe her advice is applicable to anyone who wants to have fulfilling sexual relationships. 

In this episode, Janet and I discuss identifying kinks, ways to explore them and how to communicate these to a partner. We also unpack what society often misunderstands about kink and its hidden powers. 

Janet is a wealth of knowledge and speaks with the level of frankness essential for great sexual communication. I can’t recommend Janet, and her co-author Doisse Easton’s work more. Please enjoy our full interview. 

You can read more about Janet and her work here: 

http://www.dossieeaston.com/books.html

https://slutandsons.com/

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me. 

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Welcome to The Philosophy of Sex, long-play, I’m your host Caroline Moreau-Hammond. You might remember the name Lisa Wade from our first episode of season 1 ‘Are we doing it right?Putting sex into perspective’. 

Professor and Sociologist, Lisa Wade is an associate professor at  Tulane University in New Orleans where she teaches gender and sexuality studies. Before receiving her PHD in sociology at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lisa earned an MA in human sexuality from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts and Philosophy from The University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her recent book American Hookup is an open minded, compassionate and unflinching account on the new culture of sex on American University campuses. 

Resources:

Lisa Wade - American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me.

Credits:

Creator & host: Caroline Moreau-Hammond
Editor & original music: Zoltan Fecso

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Welcome to The Philosophy of Sex, long-play, I’m your host Caroline Moreau-Hammond. You might remember the name Jeanne Proust from our third episode of season 1 ‘Why is sex still taboo?’. 

Professor and Philosopher, Jeanne Proust (no relation to Marcel Proust) is a post-doctoral teaching fellow at Fordham University and an adjunct professor at New York University and Pace University in the United States. She has studied Philosophy and Visual Arts in Bordeaux, Berlin, and Paris and her PhD dissertation at the Panthéon-Sorbonne focused on the pathologies of willpower, both in philosophical and psychological perspectives, but her interests are wide including, Ethics, Philosophy of Technologies, Bioethics, Feminist theory, and Aesthetics. 

Jeanne is an advocate for a widening of philosophical education beyond academic frontiers; she regularly gives public talks in philosophy and produces her own podcast, "Can You Phil It?” which aims to make philosophical texts and ideas accessible to a wider audience.

In this episode, Jeanne and I examine taboo, the important role transgression plays in desire, the trivialisation of sexuality and the need for more nuanced conversations about taboo and sexuality. 

Because we weren’t able to include everything in Episode 1 of The Philosophy of Sex, please enjoy our full interview. 

Resources:

Can You Phil It podcast: Apple & Spotify  

Recommended reading by Jeanne: 

Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, 2006.

Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, 2012. 

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981. 

Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., 2001

Ann Cahill, Overcoming objectification, A Carnal Ethics, 2011. 

Connect with us:

@becuming.me

Becuming takes the frustration out of finding the perfect sex toy by sending you personalised recommendations. Check it out at www.becuming.me.

Credits:

Creator & host: Caroline Moreau-Hammond
Editor & original music: Zoltan Fecso

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.