Sex Panic: Policing Pornography, Desire, and Women’s Sexual Agency in a Post-Me Too Era

A conversation with writer Mary Katharine Tramontana: 

"Sex Panic: Policing Pornography, Desire, and Women’s Sexual Agency in a Post-Me Too Era"

F-Festival

In our post-MeToo landscape of rapidly-shifting sexual norms, expectations and laws about sex at work, on campus, and on a night out are being reordered. Uncertainty and fear around sex have ushered in a historical moment of sexual regression. Young people are having record-low sex – a generation has been dubbed “puriteen” – and laments over the death of sex in film are part of this new sex panic. We’ll talk about the trend of academics and journalists who call for a policing of our sexual behaviours and their explicit depiction into a good (‘gentle,’ monogamous) and bad (BDSM, nonmonogamous) moralism, and how these attempts to instruct desires to align with ideology echo the past, including fascist notions of politically correct sex, militant sexual proscriptions of the 1970s and 80s feminist sex wars, and more recent attempts to discipline desire: conversion therapy.

Mary Katharine Tramontana is an American writer, poet, and photographer living in Berlin. Her print and mega-viral journalism on feminist sexual politics, queerness, and culture in The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, The Guardian, and other major outlets asks how we may live our lives differently. She’s collaborated with institutions like Reina Sofía and the Spanish Film Archive in Madrid; the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami; the Gay Museum and Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. She has an MA in Literature, Language, and Culture from Free University Berlin, and has previously worked as a sexuality research assistant at the Kinsey Institute.