Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Welcome to Links and Overthinks! This is your monthly round-up of things I’ve seen, heard, read, or talked about in the last few weeks. Got a suggestion for something you think I should check out? Let me know!
WE STILL CAN’T MAKE UP OUR MINDS ABOUT PORN
The Guardian ran an excerpt from academic Fiona Vera-Gray’s book Women on Porn: One hundred stories. One vital conversation. It’s actually a fairly balanced piece, but there is a lot of very well trodden ground stuff about body image and how women in porn are always waxed to high heaven and how it’s “not realistic” and it’s all reasonably valid but my goodness I have read a lot of these kinds of articles.
This is one of those subjects that makes me feel old. I read this and I realise I’ve been writing about sex in one form or another for almost fifteen years. And this conversation—about the impact of porn on body image—is one that just keeps coming up again and again. I get it. As each new generation approaches adulthood, discovers porn, starts to reflect on their own body and sexuality, they start to have questions. And we need the journalism we produce, the content we create, to address those questions, even if it feels boring to those of us who’ve moved on in our thinking. I actually had this exact conversation with a fellow journalist last summer. Her beat is ethics and sustainability and she was describing the ennui she feels when she has to write the same stories over and over again when she really feels we ought, by now, to collectively be at a greater level of understanding, particularly about the climate crisis. I absolutely feel that frustration but what I said to her at the time was that we have to accept that people arrive at understanding at different speeds and at different times and so part of the work is continuing to find ways to talk about the same things, so that there’s fresh, relevant information, storytelling, and analysis for everyone, at every point of the journey.
Anyway, that was me on a good day. On other days I’d probably just post this going “ohmygod why are we still talking about thissssss??!”
QUEER GAZING AT KRISTEN STEWART
Kristen Stewart described her February Rolling Stone cover as “the gayest thing ever” which obviously sent the discourse machine into overdrive. When the far right commentariat started weighing in, Stewart released a statement accusing them of being mad about the display of a “sexuality that’s not designed for exclusively straight males”.