Dr. Angela Jones, a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University, is the guest on this week’s 404 Media podcast, where the discussion centers on a blunt premise: sex is treated as private, but it is also shaped by the public systems people live under.
The episode is tied to Jones’s newly launched book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives. According to 404 Media, Jones uses the book to argue for a broader way of talking about sexuality than the usual one-person-in-one-bedroom frame.
Jones writes in the book: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.” That is the hinge for the interview, which treats erotic life as something entangled with culture, markets, technology and institutions, rather than sealed off from them.
404 Media says the conversation covers the history of sexology, the problem of defining sex, and how sex toys complicate that definition. The episode also gets into Jones’s experience buying and using a sex doll, a subject that sits squarely in the uncomfortable zone between intimacy, consumer hardware and social meaning.
Jones has written widely on gender, sexuality and the sex industry. Their scholarly work has appeared in journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar. They are also the author, co-author or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry, which was published in 2020.
The new interview also addresses the more personal material in Sex in Public. According to 404 Media, the most vulnerable passages in Jones’s book are also the sections readers most often want to talk about. That detail is not incidental. A book about the public force of erotic life will land differently when the author’s own experience is part of the evidence.
The episode is available through the 404 Media podcast feeds on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. 404 Media says paid subscribers receive early access to interview episodes through a subscribers-only feed hosted by Transistor, along with an unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version.
404 Media also links to Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives and Lorelei Lee’s essay “Cash/Consent” for listeners who want the reading list behind the conversation.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
