Sex Dolls, AI Girlfriends, and the Problem With “Real” Sex | Dr. Angela Jones

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in her new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, she is the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Her latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched this month. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.”

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when she bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in her book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss.

Sex in PublicThe Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

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