Straight White American Jesus - The Great American Pornography Wars
Aired: 2022-07-04
Duration: 07:11


=== Saved by Both Jesus and Playboy (06:14) ===

[00:00:00]  Axis Mundy Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
[00:00:17]  Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
[00:00:21]  Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
[00:00:37]  My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
[00:00:41]  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.
[00:00:51]  So, Dr. Burke, Kelsey, thanks for joining me.
[00:00:53]  Thank you so much, Brad.
[00:00:54]  I'm a big fan of yours.
[00:00:57]  I will say I'm a huge fan of yours, because the book you've written here is just sort of marvelous.
[00:01:02]  It's called The Pornography Wars, The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession.
[00:01:07]  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.
[00:01:18]  I'm not going to lie, I do this for a living.
[00:01:20]  I get to do this every week.
[00:01:22]  And usually I feel pretty good about like, Hey, here's the questions I want to ask.
[00:01:26]  the National Science Foundation and other places.
[00:01:29]  And her writing has appeared at the Washington Post and Newsweek, Salon and Slate and other outlets.
[00:01:36]  I'm not gonna lie, I do this for a living.
[00:01:37]  I get to do this every week.
[00:01:38]  And usually I feel pretty good about like, hey, here's the questions I wanna ask.
[00:01:42]  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.
[00:01:57]  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.
[00:02:06]  And so I want to just start with the very first pages of the book in those pages.
[00:02:11]  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.
[00:02:19]  I will say your conversion strikingly similar to mine.
[00:02:22]  I grew up in a non-religious household as you did a nominally religious perhaps is a better word.
[00:02:27]  Converted, as you did, you had this amazing lakeside conversion at like 15.
[00:02:34]  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.
[00:02:44]  However, at the very end of the prologue, you have a sentence that is dazzling.
[00:02:51]  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.
[00:03:04]  And Kelsey Burke is somebody who could have a career as a writer if she wanted to give up sociology.
[00:03:11]  Here is the sentence I'm talking about.
[00:03:13]  Looking back at my life as a teenager, I can say that both Jesus and Playboy saved me.
[00:03:19]  Would you just mind unpacking that just for a second so we kind of see the stage that set you up for this book?
[00:03:27]  Sure.
[00:03:27]  Well, thank you for the introduction and all the kind words.
[00:03:32]  You know, I was a bit on the fence about writing about myself at all in this book.
[00:03:38]  You know, as an academic, this is not what we are trained at all to do.
[00:03:43]  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?
[00:03:53]  Like, what's my angle?
[00:03:55]  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.
[00:04:04]  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.
[00:04:18]  I was, you know, a really socially awkward adolescent.
[00:04:21]  I struggled to make friends and sort of feel like I found my place.
[00:04:26]  And so that was a space where I was able to do that.
[00:04:30]  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.
[00:04:40]  But at the same time that all of this was happening, I was really aware of Christian messages about sexuality.
[00:04:49]  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.
[00:05:00]  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.
[00:05:13]  So it turns out my dad was a subscriber for well over a decade.
[00:05:19]  And I became kind of obsessed with these magazines.
[00:05:22]  I read every single one cover to cover.
[00:05:25]  I sort of felt like I was Playboy's biggest fan, that I just was so into these magazines.
[00:05:30]  And I knew cognitively that, like, these two things Jesus, Playboy, Church, my sexuality, that they didn't quite match up.
[00:05:40]  But in my lived experience, they did go together.
[00:05:44]  Like, I was experiencing both things simultaneously, and it didn't feel really like a conflict.
[00:05:50]  Both of those elements really felt I guess right, for lack of a better word.
[00:05:56]  So that's why I write that, you know, it was both Jesus and Playboy who saved me.
[00:06:01]  Eventually I ended up leaving the church.
[00:06:03]  I transferred out of a Baptist college that I started attending.
[00:06:07]  I came out as gay and my life now makes it seem like I'm definitely an outsider to that Baptist church.

=== Why Jesus and Playboy Saved Me (00:56) ===

[00:06:15]  You know, I'm this like I'm a queer feminist.
[00:06:17]  I'm now a member of a Unitarian church.
[00:06:20]  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.
[00:06:29]  Thanks for listening to this free preview of our SWADGE episode.
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