what i’m reading
This week I read Heather Berg‘s book Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism in preparation for the new podcast Sex Industry Book Club, which will feature this book in its first episode.
As someone who dropped out of the conventional labor market many years ago–opting for more creative and flexible employment–her characterization of porn workers as creatively refusing “work” and undermining the notion of what labor looks like deeply resonated. What I also like about the book is it’s centering of pleasure as a form of resistance against the tyranny of late capitalism.
Much of the current sex work discourse touts “sex work is work” as its slogan. While it is important to center the labor that drives the movement (how else can we be recognized as workers in need of rights?), doing so at the expense of the joy and pleasure that can be found in the work has always felt improvised to me. Sex work is work, but it is also so much more. For me, it is also relationships with people that I deeply cherish with a lot of pleasure and kindness along the way.
what I’m thinking about
This morning I listened to an episode of Conner Habib‘s podcast, Everyone Against Conner Habib, where he talked with a friend about Lacanian psychoanalysis. Despite the fact that I have been exposed to a lot of psychoanalysis in grad school and through my friends and colleagues who are practitioners, I never really understood the notion of jouissance. Habib explains it as the intense pleasure and also pain that comes from being near something you want but not being able to quite possess it; the simultaneous fear and excitement that comes from standing at the precipice of desire.
He brings up a few examples: standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and feeling a swell of desire to jump in. Also, hard fucking. It is the hard fucking that stood out to me.
In the show, he talks about the intense desire to fuck another to the point of merging with them, but not being able to actually get there. Fucking harder and harder hoping to be able to unite with them, but all the while recognizing that they are still somehow distant from you/other than you. His friend described the friction of that tension as the thing that leads to orgasm, the partial satisfaction of that desire, though it always leaves room for more.
There was something profound about that observation that is still rolling around in my head.
what i’m excited for
On Sunday I’m headed to Miami! I’m looking forward to walking barefoot on the beach, feeling the sand between my toes and the water slapping against my legs. I have a lovely hotel in South Beach and I hope to do some entertaining there!
Reach out if you happen to be in the area and want to spend some time together!
availability & booking
why wait for next friday? book our romantic tryst now.