Tag Archives: sex work

EVENT: Join me + AEWCH guests Heather Berg & Kathi Weeks for a live discussion on sex work as anti-work!

7 May

Hi friends,

I’ll be on a panel discussing sex work as anti-work politics as part of Seattle’s Red May festival. I’ll be in discussion with AEWCH guests Kathi Weeks and Heather Berg, as well as femi babylon and Cassandra Troyan!

The info is here, and it’s free to sign up!

Also, check out other Red May events with AEWCH guests like Dean Spade, Franco Bifo Berardi, Michael Hardt, and more!

XO
CH

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Pornography is an archive of desire. I talk with Dr. Kate Lister (AKA Whores of Yore) about it, and what sex IS, anyway, on AEWCH 102!

10 Mar

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AEWCH102TitleCardAGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 102: KATE LISTER (@WhoresOfYore) or THE ARCHIVE OF DESIRES

Friends,

As this episode goes out, there’s a hysteria about touching one another. Not just kissing, not just holding, not just sex, but even shaking hands, even being within a few feet of somebody. But touch, and the ways we touch, have always been troubled by definitions and rules handed to us by others and the metaphors we’ve inherited.

So it’s time – isn’t it time? – to talk more about the ways we view touch, the ways we view intimacy and sex, and pornography. So I invited the amazing Dr. Kate Lister, a sex historian known for her hugely popular twitter account Whores Of Yore, and now for her excellent book, A Curious History Of Sex . Both the twitter account and the book are grand compendiums of sex in history and theory. Also? Very, very funny.

We talk a lot about the history of sexual imagery, the ways we touch each other, and, in perhaps the most challenging of all questions – What sex is. It’s not as obvious as you think!

This is the second of a pair of episodes that are deep dives into sex and intimacy, the first of which was AEWCH 101, “The Trouble With Consent” featuring Katherine Angel.
And it’s a deep, penetrating, hot episode. Enjoy it in yer ears!


ON THIS EPISODE

  • The way we all experience one aspect of our sexual awakening through pornography + Kate’s first experience and mine (which I compare to John in the Bible)
  • How anti-porn activism is a rehash of childhood misunderstandings of sex
  • How the language we use today can’t contain the way we looked at sex in the past
  • Porn is there because we want it, it’s not merely that we want it because it’s there
  • Taxidermy in old porn shoots?
  • Attempts to control consent by people and institutions in power, and how sex workers take some of that back
  • The way “wokeness” can interfere with seeing sex and power dynamics clearly
  • Pornography as political protest and why those pictures of Trump and Putin making out aren’t JUST homophobia
  • What sex is, anyway?And does desire always collapse into nothingness?
  • How we don’t understand our desires

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Kate, just follow Whores Of Yore on twitter, and also go to her website, which is a huge archive of sexual information, including in-depth historical essays about sex by Kate and others. Also, here’s a good, brief interview with her.

• One of my earliest essays on porn was “By The Time You’ve Seen It’s Too Late” in which I compare seeing porn to The Evil Dead.

• Would you like to learn more about the 28,000 year old stone penis? Of course you would. And here’s a bit on Jill Cook of the British Museum, asserting that we had sex before we understood that it made babies.

• Do fetuses masturbate? Well, probably? Maybe?

• There’s a great book about the invention of pornography called The Secret Museum: Pornography In Modern Culture. It’s by Walter Kendrick, and well worth reading. Another great book on the same subject is The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity edited by Lynn Hunt (this is the book I mention later that has lots of information about pornography as political protest).

• I talk a lot about the need for conversations about resilience with Sara Maria Griffin on AEWCH 93.

• Here’s a short article on Christine Helliwell talking to Dayak women in Borneo about the different concept of sex and assault.

• A conversation between Heather Berg and I about sex work and the wage-labor relationship is here.

• “I am a whore. Find something else to fight about.” –Nell Gwynn, after two men were fighting after one called her a whore.

• Did you miss Hole drummer Patty Schemel on AEWCH 60? Don’t.

• I talk about the origins of sex on AEWCH 92, which is called…wait for it…The Origins Of Sex!

• And there;s a book about a very different thing with the same title – The Origins Of Sex: A History Of The First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala. It’s great.

• I’ve brought up What Is Sex? by Alenka Zupančič many times on the show. If you’re interested in a dense psychoanlytical investigation of sex, check it out. And also I talk about Wilhelm Reich on this bonus episode, and on AEWCH 59 with Reich James Strick.

• Kate mentions Joan Price, and I think her work with desire and aging is worth checking out.

• Here’s a great interview with legendary gay porn director Joe Gage in BUTT Magazine.

• I wrote an essay on my (homo)sexual awakening waaaay back in 2010 (the essay, not the awakening); it’s called “Looking At Men.”

• A book I love on the sex lives of animals (well THAT’S a way to open a sentence) is Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation by Olivia Judson.

• I mention the Katherine Angel episode, but you should really get and read her amazing book, Unmastered.

Until next time, friends, don’t give up on your desires!
CH
NG

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A portrait of my era of porn production, featuring my pal and scene partner, Johnny Hazzard. It’s AEWCH 88!

29 Oct

AEWCH88 Title Card
AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 88: JOHNNY HAZZARD
or A PORTRAIT OF THE (PORN) ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

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Friends,

For the first time ever, I have a fellow gay performer on the show, Johnny Hazzard. Johnny was a prolific performer and still appears in great and arousing movies; but more recently of the mainstream sort, like his great movie about two gay brothers, Tiger Orange.

Johnny and I talk about our era of adult films, which overlapped and, um, let’s say intersected in the scene we filmed together. We spend a lot of time talking about those eras, trying to express how complicated it was, even though people want to simplify it into purely negative and positive pictures.

Our free and easy way of talking about sex might help indicate to you what it’s like for so many of us when we’re on set. On a good day, there’s a friendliness and ease around bodies and sex that can’t  be found almost anywhere else.. This was so much fun, and I’m so excited to finally share an episode with one of my cumrades with you. Yeah, I said cumrades.

We talk

  • Why Johnny left adult
  • The ways being in adult can heal and harm us
  • Homosexuality and brotherhood
  • The difference between our eras of adult and the new OnlyFans era
  • Our first experiences going to set
  • Why I idolized performers before I started and why Johnny didn’t
  • Gay adult performer suicides
  • The skills you can get from being in porn and how they’re ignored by so many of us
  • Why “normal”  jobs – including mainstream acting – are worse than adult.
  • Why hating sex workers is the same impulse as homophobia
  • How much performers get paid

To go deeper, check out the show notes here.

JHPromoImage

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