Mar 272016
 

This Friday, Tristan Taormino welcomes Jaclyn Friedman to Sex Out Loud – they will be together in our LA studio LIVE, so call in and join the conversation! 866-472-5788

JFheadshotLB-1-300x199Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, speaker and activist, and creator of the hit books Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (one of Publishers’ Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009, and #11 on Ms. Magazine’s Top 100 Feminist Nonfiction of All Time list) and What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety. Her popular podcast, Unscrewed, is paving new paths to sexual liberation.

As an undergraduate, Jaclyn thought she was too smart to become a victim of sexual assault – until another student proved her wrong. That experience eventually led her to become a student and instructor of IMPACT safety training. At IMPACT, she helped bring safety skills to the communities which most need them, including gang-involved high school students and women transitioning out of abusive relationships.

Friedman’s work has popularized the “yes means yes” standard of sexual consent that is quickly becoming law on many US campuses. She has also helped redefine the concept of “healthy sexuality,” starting with two landmark pieces: the interview “F*cking While Feminist” and the highly personal polemic “My Sluthood, Myself,” which together inspired thousands of responses and explorations across the blogosphere and beyond. Her insistence that authentic sexual liberation is a necessary condition to end the systemic sexualization and violation of women led Lyn Mikel Brown (Co-founder of SPARK and Professor of Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Colby College) to call her “this generation’s version of Dr. Ruth.”

Friedman is a popular speaker on campuses and at conferences across the U.S. and beyond. She has been a guest on the Today Show, Nightline, PBS News Hour, the Melissa Harris-Perry Show, and numerous other radio and television shows, and her commentary has appeared in outlets including CNN, Time, The Washington Post, The Nation, Jezebel and The Huffington Post. She is a SheSource expert and a Progressive Women’s Voices alumna, and was named one of 2009’s Top 40 Progressive Leaders Under 40 by the New Leaders Council. Friedman is a founder and the former Executive Director of Women, Action & the Media, where she led the successful #FBrape campaign to apply Facebook’s hate-speech ban to content that promotes gender-based violence. Friedman also holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.

Tune in Friday, April 1 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET to hear this show. Join the discussion on Twitter where we livetweet each week. Sex Out Loud airs every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com. If you missed any part of the episode or want to listen again, you can listen to every episode on demand here.

Jul 082012
 


My head is still spinning from my first appearance on Melissa Harris-Perry on Saturday. Watch it below or at these links—Segment 1: Porn in America and Segment 2: The Business of Pornography. I’ve done a fair amount of television appearances, and I have mixed feelings about them. In the past, I feel like many TV producers shy away from difficult topics, don’t allow for complex, nuanced analysis, and often want me to “dumb it down.” This time, none of that happened. I was excited when a producer for the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC contacted me last week about a show about female sexuality and porn. We had a spirited conversation where I feel like she really listened to me, rather than attempted to fit me into a quasi-script she had already written. When I found out that one of my co-panelists was author and activist Jaclyn Friedman, I felt relieved to have a sex-positive feminist sister there.

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Segment 1 of 2 “Porn in America”

Fun fact: Jaclyn Friedman and I were both in the class of ’93 at Wesleyan University, and we were fellow activists and friends during college. Although we’ve followed and supported each other’s careers since then (I blurbed her newest book What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame Free Guide to Sex and Safety and she appeared on my radio show Sex Out Loud), we hadn’t been in the same room since the late 90s. We had dinner the night before, and Jaclyn reminded me we wouldn’t talk about the show, so that everything would stay fresh for the next day. We had plenty of catching up to do, so it didn’t matter!

At every stage of the booking process, the folks behind the scenes at MHP were competent, respectful, and, well, have their shit together. In the green room before the show, Jaclyn and I met Zephyr Lookout (author of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics) who sat on the panel for an earlier segment and would be joining ours. She is a law professor at Fordham. I liked her immediately, and we bonded over our love of the children’s book Tuck Everlasting. She admitted she was “probably the most anti-porn of everyone on the panel,” which I appreciated her saying up front. It’s actually refreshing to engage with someone who really wants to dig into the topic and isn’t just ready to shut you down (like Gail Dines and crew are). After being fitted with our mics and mic packs (during which Jaclyn had her hands all the way up my dress to assist the sound guy), the three of us sat down at the table. That’s when I met the fourth panelist, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson (author of Holler If You Hear Me), and I truly had no idea what he was going to say about porn. I was pleasantly surprised to discover he knows quite a bit about it (he name checked Lexington Steele and Mr. Marcus!) and had smart things to say.

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Segment 2 of 2 “Business of Pornography”

MHP introduced me as a feminist pornographer and showed the cover of my new book The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, co-edited with Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young and forthcoming from The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2013. The two segments just flew by so fast, and suddenly, she was doing the closing of the show (naming activist teen Julia Bluhm the Foot Soldier of the Week for petitioning Seventeen magazine).

Afterward, we all stood in the hallway, continuing the conversation, and I got to meet several more of the show’s producers including Jamil Smith and Executive Producer Shirley Zilberstein. Melissa Harris-Perry is so smart, it’s actually intimidating. But in a good way. Obviously, we barely scratched the surface on some pretty important topics. I have a whole lot more to say about race politics in the porn industry, shifting representations of sexuality in porn, today’s porn economy, queer porn, and on and on. But this was definitely a start, and great one.

Jaclyn Friedman, me, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson backstage at MHP

Very few mainstream media outlets, and even fewer, if any, television news shows are willing to look at porn in an intelligent or balanced way. I am so impressed that Melissa Harris-Perry and her producers took a risk and really broke down a barrier. I know they have already gotten flack about it from conservatives and anti-porn feminists. So, if you want to show your support for the topic of this show, applaud Melissa Harris-Perry and MSNBC for making space for this conversation, you can do so in a number of ways:

Watch the clips: Segment 1 “Porn in America” and Segment 2 “The Business of Pornography”

Comment on the blog about the segments

Email the MSNBC network with your support

Tweet your support to @MHPShow and @MSNBCTV