Brad speaks with Dr. Kelsy Burke, a sociologist from the University of Nebraska, who discusses her new book The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/pornography-wars-9781635577365/
Burke spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography's opponents and its sympathizers. She does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and today I have an amazing guest to talk about a rich and provocative book, and that is Dr. Kelsey Burke.
So, Dr. Burke, Kelsey, thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much, Brad.
I'm a big fan of yours.
I will say I'm a huge fan of yours, because the book you've written here is just sort of marvelous.
It's called The Pornography Wars, The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession.
And before I jump into just asking you all about it, I'll just say that Dr. Burke is an award-winning sociologist who is an associate professor of sociology.
I'm not going to lie, I do this for a living.
I get to do this every week.
And usually I feel pretty good about like, Hey, here's the questions I want to ask.
the National Science Foundation and other places.
And her writing has appeared at the Washington Post and Newsweek, Salon and Slate and other outlets.
I'm not gonna lie, I do this for a living.
I get to do this every week.
And usually I feel pretty good about like, hey, here's the questions I wanna ask.
And after like sort of approaching your book, I tried to send you five or six questions and I really had like 60 or 70 that I wanted to send So we're talking about something that I think a lot of people.
Know about in terms of just a history of obscenity and obscenity laws in this country debates about pornography and those debates being somewhat complex.
And so I want to just start with the very first pages of the book in those pages.
You share your kind of personal story a little bit and you kind of set the stage for how you got into this research as a sociologist.
I will say your conversion strikingly similar to mine.
I grew up in a non-religious household as you did a nominally religious perhaps is a better word.
Converted, as you did, you had this amazing lakeside conversion at like 15.
And all of a sudden, you know, you were a kind of youth group attending Jesus devoted person in a way that didn't quite fit into your family.
However, at the very end of the prologue, you have a sentence that is dazzling.
And friends, I will tell you that as somebody who's been in the Academy for 20 years, I have so many smart friends who I love and who, I'll just say, are not the most Dazzling of writers.
And Kelsey Burke is somebody who could have a career as a writer if she wanted to give up sociology.
Here is the sentence I'm talking about.
Looking back at my life as a teenager, I can say that both Jesus and Playboy saved me.
Would you just mind unpacking that just for a second so we kind of see the stage that set you up for this book?
Sure.
Well, thank you for the introduction and all the kind words.
You know, I was a bit on the fence about writing about myself at all in this book.
You know, as an academic, this is not what we are trained at all to do.
But I felt like it was important to tell a bit of my story because I think for anybody picking up a book about pornography, readers want to know, like, where is the author coming from?
Like, what's my angle?
So I thought I would just get that out of the way with a story that, yes, culminates in this line about being saved by both Jesus and Playboy.
So as you mentioned, I was a very devoted born-again teenager, and in a lot of ways the Baptist church that I ended up attending and joining did so many good things for me.
I was, you know, a really socially awkward adolescent.
I struggled to make friends and sort of feel like I found my place.
And so that was a space where I was able to do that.
And I was able to ask big questions about life and death and questions that I had, but I didn't really know, you know, where to where to put them or where to place them.
But at the same time that all of this was happening, I was really aware of Christian messages about sexuality.
And how deep down I knew that who I was didn't really match up with this image of the Christian woman that I was supposed to live up to or grow up and become.
And so it was the same time that I was really active in my church that I found a box in my family's storage room that was filled with old issues of Playboy magazine.
So it turns out my dad was a subscriber for well over a decade.
And I became kind of obsessed with these magazines.
I read every single one cover to cover.
I sort of felt like I was Playboy's biggest fan, that I just was so into these magazines.
And I knew cognitively that, like, these two things Jesus, Playboy, Church, my sexuality, that they didn't quite match up.
But in my lived experience, they did go together.
Like, I was experiencing both things simultaneously, and it didn't feel really like a conflict.
Both of those elements really felt I guess right, for lack of a better word.
So that's why I write that, you know, it was both Jesus and Playboy who saved me.
Eventually I ended up leaving the church.
I transferred out of a Baptist college that I started attending.
I came out as gay and my life now makes it seem like I'm definitely an outsider to that Baptist church.
You know, I'm this like I'm a queer feminist.
I'm now a member of a Unitarian church.
But I tell the story just to say that I'm not completely an outsider, you know, to situate myself and my background within the broader context of what I write about in the book.
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