What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: JoAnn Wypijewski (VIRTUAL EVENT: In Conversation with Amber Hollibaugh)

• Legal, Politics & Economics

What if we took sex out of the box marked “special,” the contents of which are either the worst or best thing a person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of human life in general? In this extraordinary book, and in defiance of the long-standing media obsessions that turn every sexual topic into a morality tale of monsters and victims, shame and virtue, journalist JoAnn Wypijewski does exactly that.

From the criminalization of HIV to the frenzy over “pedophile priests,” from unexamined assumptions about the murder of Matthew Shepard to the accusations made against Woody Allen, from Brett Kavanaugh to Abu Ghraib, Wypijewski takes some of the most famous stories of recent decades and turns them inside out. The result is a searing indictment of modern sexual politics. She exposes the myriad ways moral panic and a punitive culture are intertwined, considering along the way the nature of pleasure, censorship, self-deception, memory and much more.

What emerges is a picture of a culture in which crude morality plays acted out in the media have contributed to an imprisoning embrace of the repressive power of the state. Politics exists in the mess of life. Sex does too, Wypijewski insists, and so must sexual politics, if it is to make any sense at all.

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer and editor based in New York. For eighteen years, from 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at The Nation magazine. She has written for the magazine, as well as for Harper’s, CounterPunch, The New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and other publications. She is on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. She was the co-editor with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.

Amber Hollibaugh is a longtime lesbian writer and activist living in NYC. Involved in the movements of the 60s, in the fights against anti-gay discrimination in the “Save Our Children” period of the 70s, in feminist debates over sex and organizing around HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s, in the founding of Queers for Economic Justice in the 2000s, she is a pioneer in practicing a politics at the convergence of sex, class, race, and gender. Her essay collection, My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, was published by Duke University Press in 2000.