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.

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Fushigi Yuugi (Curious Play) was one of my favourite anime when I was younger. It’s a fantasy story in which a teenage girl is pulled into a book. I remember it as a vaguely sexual adventure story, just look at that very short school uniform skirt!

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.