Curiosities Curated: School Girl Fetishisms, Hot Money, More Porn Readings
This is gonna be a thing for a bit longer. Send me more media!
Hi, I’m Jeannette, and this is the 26th issue of The Sex Beat, a newsletter documenting my research on sex. It’s been a busy season, but I wanted to share some of the stuff I’ve found recently. Regular programming (not that I’ve been following a super fixed format) will be back soon – hopefully. Don’t want to get this newsletter anymore? Go ahead and unsubscribe here.
I have a lot of thoughts, but none of them have turned into words yet. Last weekend was the first actual break I’ve gotten in a while – I spent two days mostly sleeping and the last couple of days catching up on work, so my brain is still mush.
But when I manage to gather a bit more time, these are some of the things I want to spend that time on.
Fetishism of school girl uniforms
When I was writing my MRes thesis, there was a small portion on infantilisation in pornography. To add nuance, one of my supervisors asked me to look into representations of the school girl, and more specifically, the Japanese school girl.
I came across an interesting article by Sharon Kinsella in Fashion Theory – What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms? – about the military-style Japanese school uniform and what it symbolises. The article explores things like “Lolita complex subculture” and “erotic-grotesque school children”.
Doesn’t it sound fascinating? And how else has the school girl been analysed since then?
Hot Money: Who Rules Porn?
Someone sent me a link to Hot Money: Who Rules Porn?, a podcast series produced by Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, about power, finance and the business of online porn. I just started listening and I’m already hooked.
It’s available on Apple Podcasts, but I’m listening to it on Spotify so I can play it at 2x speed.
Although some of the information’s been available on Wikipedia, and has been covered in other feature stories, it’s still pretty mind-blowing to realise that many of the popular tube sites, where most online pornography can be found, is owned by a single company.
Money is also one of my obsessions, so as you can imagine, I’m very excited to listen to the rest of the podcast series!
More on my to-read list
I’m halfway through two of the three books I listed last week. And there are a couple more I want to start reading in the next week or so:
Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China by Y. Yvon Wang
It’s described as “an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.”
I’m immediately enticed.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Hopefully I can add some of these books to my Bibliographies section at some point.
Do you have media – movies, books, podcasts, videos, blogs, articles etc – to recommend? I’m always on the lookout, so please feel free to share. Hit reply and say hey.
I love reading about sex. I'm thinking of reading Juliette Marquis de Sade, although I haven't gotten around to buying the book. It is a dark novel.. perhaps there are some themes in there which you would be interested in.