Sex. Voyeur. Power. Fetish.
These words, backdropped by suggestive sexual images, flash on the screen as Rihanna’s “S&M” plays during the official course trailer for HISTORY 112: “Sexual Pleasure in the Modern World.” This class, one of the most popular courses in the department and, by a wide margin, the most provocative, arouses many questions both academic and ethical.
What is sexual pleasure? What are its limits? More bluntly, does this course belong in a university?
In keeping with The Lemur’s firm commitment to free inquiry and “letting the good ideas win,” I decided to sit down with the professor of the course, Dr. Pete Sigal—a professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke. Our conversation spanned everything from the perhaps now-forgotten “Duke porn star” case to pushing the boundaries of discomfort in the classroom, and wrestling with complex issues like obscenity, perversion, and sexual violence.
The transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. I hope you find this as thought-provoking as I did.
The Lemur: I’ve heard so much about this course…When there’s a course called “Sexual Pleasure in the Modern World,” your brain goes kind of everywhere. What exactly is talked about in the class? What is it?
Dr. Sigal: What could it be? I like that. I don’t talk to media about this course, except that you’re a Duke student, so I figured that would be good. But also, when you said [before the conversation] that The Lemur is trying to think capaciously and outside the box—that’s exactly what I’m trying to do in the course.
The Lemur: I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but the idea of [The Lemur] is that we disagree on all kinds of stuff, but one of the things we do agree on is, if there is a good idea, quote unquote, the good idea will win out. And so we were thinking, if someone is overtly censoring something, that there’s probably some level of being afraid that the idea they have is not able to beat that idea in a fair battle ground of ideas. That’s our whole philosophy.
Dr. Sigal: Right, exactly. Exactly. And I agree that, when we’re censoring things, we’re doing so much damage.
The Lemur: My first question is very general: why do you teach this course? I know you have a background, I believe, in Latin American history. So, what draws you to this course?
Dr. Sigal: My background is Latin American history and the history of sexuality. But, you’re right that my backgrounds is in mostly premodern research, and so I was drawn to this course. I was originally drawn to this course it seemed—and I believe this was 2015 or 2016 when I started teaching the course—there had just been the controversy of the Duke porn star.
The Lemur: What’s that?
Dr. Sigal: You haven’t heard about it? Less and less people have heard about it. So, this was a Duke freshman who was just having trouble paying her bills and saw an ad, essentially—if I’m getting this correctly—looking for people to do porn who were college students. And, she answered the ad. They flew her out to Los Angeles, she did some porn, and then she was harassed, really endlessly by other students. And, Duke administrators, at times were helpful to her, and at times were not. It just seemed to me that the students, faculty, and administrators all had the wrong approach to this student, and I wanted to do something that would speak to these students.
I wanted to do something was also related to my current research, which is on the relationship between colonialism and modern sexual pleasure. And so, I really combined those two into thinking about colonialism, modern sexual pleasure, pornography, and different sorts of tropes that are played out within pornography, as well as thinking about why our society would be judgmental for doing that sort of thing—doing the sort of thing that she was doing for acting and porn?
Editor’s Note: More on the “Duke porn star” story here.
The Lemur: Yeah, I have never heard of that. So, can you touch a little bit more on this:what was your personal journey to studying the history of sexuality ? I was doing some snooping around, and I think you studied somewhere in California, at one of the UCs.
Dr. Sigal: UCLA. I started at UCLA in 1989. And at that time, I was focused on colonial Latin America, and I was focused on sexuality, and I had become really interested in thinking about sexuality because sexuality just interested me, especially why people are attracted to doing particular kinds of things. I had gone to college initially thinking, “Okay, I really want to do something related to Latin America because I’m really interested in how different kinds of peoples interact, people coming from different backgrounds, from different cultures.”
And I quickly found that what interested me most was the way in which the indigenous people and the Spaniards, and people coming from Africa, most slaves, were interacting on a very intimate level, on a sexual level. And my advisor said, “Wow, that’s really cool. Let’s study it. Let’s go into the linguistics of it. Let’s go into the real details, not what people had traditionally done—just thinking about rape and sexual coercion—but also how the different groups influenced each other in terms of ideas, in terms of what kind of sexual ideology they’re gonna have. Sexual sin, in the case of [the] Spaniards, right?
The Lemur: So [my] next question has more to deal with, I guess, the topic of the course in particular. How would you—and you can take this in whatever direction you want—describe sexual ethics in America today and then, relatedly, at Duke? You touched on that a little but, but what do you think of it is today?
Dr. Sigal: I’m not sure I know exactly how to answer that question. It’s not so much a question of ethics, although I guess it is, right? Because as I just said, the people harassing the [Duke pornstar] student is certainly unethical. But I think of it in terms of the way in which a sexual culture develops. And so, your question is about the U.S. and Duke, you know, I think the U.S. today has… it’s hard to describe on a large level. But, you see specific, very specific instances of things related to sexual justice and whatnot, coming up as major issues and in ways in which one wouldn’t normally think that they’re major issues.
For example, abortion. It becomes this massive issue that is debated, that becomes so central. In past times, homosexuality was so central to our sexual culture and debates around homosexuality—whether or not it’s legitimate. And now, transgender issues seem to have taken over everything in so many ways. This becomes such a central issue when, in many ways, it’s just about people being people. So, I think, in terms of the way in which sexual pleasure, the way in which sexual identity, those sorts of things are treated in the current environment—it’s just very fraught.
And Duke, right, I bring up other issues when I talk about Duke in class. For example, we talk about hookup culture. We talk about the ways in which women and some men, in some cases, are objectified at Duke. And we talk about sexual harassment and those sorts of things. I think what we see at Duke is, thinking back to my broad themes, various different sexual cultures interacting in ways that are kind of uncomfortable, right? The whole hookup culture interacting with different kinds of cultures that could include a fundamentalist Christianity, in some cases, and include, in other cases, different types of sexual cultures and different types of ideas.
I like to suggest to students that, while Duke doesn’t have its own particular sexual culture, it is representative of a lot of bigger things that are going on.
The Lemur: You were talking about new debates and sexual issues in American life. And I was wondering if you have a sense of what might be the next “frontier,” for lack of a better word. Because, I’d assume at some point there’s going to be some kind of reconciliation on the whole debates over trans, and, I wonder if you have any thoughts on where [we’re going].
Dr. Sigal: I don’t know. Because I did talk about stages. You have homosexuality coming up as this key thing. You have abortion coming up. It’s this key thing. Before those, you had birth control and interracial sex, although interracial sex is a kind of constant subtopic. And now transgender issues have become so key. You know, it’s hard to tell. I think, as you see younger generations, they’re developing different sexual ideas, and they’re probably the ones who are going to bring up whatever the next sexual controversy is.
And I think right now we are at probably the pinnacle of the transgender controversy. So I think that’s gonna take a minute to settle down. I honestly have no clue exactly where we go from here, for whatever that’s worth.
The Lemur: If you’re talking about the historical ends of your course…why, in general, do you think students take the class, apart from being History majors and needing to take History courses?
Dr. Sigal: Actually, most of the students who take the class aren’t History majors. I think it varies, right? Some students are taking it because they are really struggling with their own sexuality. Other students are taking it just because it piques their interest, and they never really talked about these kinds of issues in any academic environment.
You’ve got those students, you’ve got students who are very interested in general sexuality studies, and then you’ve got students who are fascinated by porn for one reason or another, right? It can go anything from the pure current reasons to the people who are like, “Huh, why is porn so ubiquitous in our society?”
The Lemur: Yeah, I was joking when we were talking about how do we need to structure [this interview]? I was like “every thirteen-year-old boy’s dream is to be a ‘porn scholar.’” I just always thought that was so funny.
You were mentioning how there’s a barrier, when you’re looking into the history of sexual relations between different kinds of consensual [and] intimate relationships and then rape and things of that nature.
What are those lines? What does it mean for something to be obscene or perverted? When you’re talking about these sexual issues, obviously, it’s very charged and emotional, and people have all kinds of different opinions on this stuff. Do you draw lines of saying, “this is what’s right or wrong?” How do you navigate something like that?
Dr. Sigal: The only line that I draw—or that I certainly suggest—is that we don’t want there to be sexual violence, right? That’s the basic line that I draw. And sexual violence includes coercion. It includes all kinds of nonconsensual things, right? So, beyond that, everything is really up for discussion, debate—as you’re suggesting in The Lemur. Everything is up for all kinds of discussion and should be subject to a sort of rigorous analysis so I don’t really draw the lines for them.
I let students think about what their own minds should be. When you’re using terms like obscenity or perversion, I’ll use those terms, but I’ll use them in very specific contexts. Obscenity. This is a kind of legal definition, and in the class I use Supreme Court rulings on pornography to talk about what obscenity is. And, of course, perversion is much more of a psychological concept.
I might talk about the way in which psychologists develop particular ideas about perversion, the way that can relate to criminality, in some cases. Like I said, I’m drawing that line, but beyond that, I have my own opinions, and I’m not suggesting that is necessarilyright—exactly what they should agree with. Because the whole course is about sexual pleasure, and the way in which we construct it, the way in which we deal with it, the way in which it interacts with race, the way in which it interacts with coloniality. In many ways the course is problematizing the whole idea that anything is simply unproblematically good or anything is simply unproblematically bad.
The Lemur: When students are in the class, do you feel as though people go into the class generally agreeing on a lot of the same things or do you feel like there’s some really hard disagreement? Because at least in my experience, in a lot of Duke courses, there are courses where it’s like, “Hey, we’re gonna come in and disagree. We’re gonna have an open forum.” And then people just don’t [disagree]. And I’m wondering if you experience that in your course.
Dr. Sigal: It varies. This course has tended to enroll a large number of students and, therefore, it’s not a course where I can have sort of open debate. And, of course, the class I’m teaching right now is all debate. The way that I do that is I force people [to debate]. You’re given this position to defend.
But, what you’re asking is more around whether people disagree, in general. Because, as you’re suggesting, this isn’t unique to a lot of colleges. There’s a tendency to just kind of want to get along with whatever the status quo is. I try to push people outside of that. Even when I give a paper where they know my opinion on something and tell them, “Don’t simply agree with my opinion.” And, you know, people who disagree with my opinion do pretty well. So, we do have open debate. I do agree with you that there is some problem with people speaking their opinions in the course, but we do have more debate than I think I expected at first.
The Lemur: Would you say that the debate is along the lines of challenging the definitions of sexual violence you provide or is it more like people come into the course with diametrically opposed worldviews? Do people come into the course and just kind of lay into somebody’s sexual ethics, one way or the other? Or is it more along the lines of, you throw out this topic, and then people are deciding what are the limits and gray areas of the topic?
Dr. Sigal: I think more of the second. You’re not gonna have many people who come into a course on sexual pleasure in the modern world and say, “Oh, yeah, I don’t want to talk about sex, right?” That wouldn’t be reasonable for them to come into the course for that anyway. I don’t know if it’s diametrically opposed, but very, very different views on a series of issues. They’ll have people who have different views on, again, right now, transgender issues are the biggest thing, right? So, you’ll have people who have very different opinions on transgender issues, and sometimes it takes a little pulling to get them to express those differences. But I find that eventually they do, and then we can actually have debates on those issues.
I think we do also have a lot of, you know, “what are the gray areas here?” Is some form of sexual harassment really sexual harassment? Some form that some people think is very violent, and others don’t?. And also on other issues. I do a lot of music videos, and many of the music videos are highly sexual, and some people will say, “That’s going too far,” and other people who say, “That’s not [going too far].”
The Lemur: You talked about music videos, and you talked about assigning people papers to disagree in your other course. I was wondering if you could speaking, just to this course, on what students talk about and read. What are the assignments like? What do students read and watch? Who are the authors? I saw your syllabus lists the The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure as your textbook. Is that your main text?
Dr. Sigal: Yes, that’s the only book because I like to focus on both primary sources and articles. I find that’s much more useful for this course. The Feminist Porn Book is the one book they have. They read that for pieces of the second half of the semester. The first half of the semester has sets of primary documents. In some cases, court cases, in terms of Supreme Court cases and accounts, like slave accounts and those sorts of things. I’ll show them some indigenous language documents about sexuality. I’ll show them some confessional manuals and things like that.
They’ll also get the kind of theoretical framework which mostly comes from Audre Lorde and Gayle Rubin. Gayle Rubin is presenting the kind of thing that I’m suggesting, that everything is up for debate. Audre Lorde, in her “Uses of the Erotic,” is really suggesting the way in which eroticism and race connect to each other. And so that provides a theoretical framework. Then there’s a whole series of historical articles that they’ll read from there going from colonialism, to slavery, to what I talk about as really the birth of modern sexuality. Towards the end of the 19th century, we go into debates about prostitution, masturbation, and then homosexuality. From there, we go into the different sorts of things that are going on in the 20th century—going from how the world wars changed ideas of sexuality to how you develop different communities from that.
And then we cover how feminism enters into these debates in more ways than most people think. There are more feminist positions than most people think. And then we cover how the lesbian, gay, queer movement develops out of that. So, we have a wide variety of sources.
Oh, and assignments! They are watching a lot of, not just music videos, but also little sections of films, some documentaries, some fictional films, and then there’s assignments. One assignment is a creative video. It’s a two minute video that has something to do with sexual pleasure in the modern world, Then they have a paper on the relationship between colonialism and sexuality and some sort of final project that has to do with, with pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, or something transgender (it’s their choice)
The Lemur: I was looking into the authors of the textbook [The Feminist Porn Book], and they’re all somehow related to the porn industry. Three or four of them were race scholars, but they all have some kind of connection to the porn industry. Is that something that you talk about, this broader porn industry apparatus?
Dr. Sigal: Yes, it’s part of the course. The finances of it aren’t particularly my expertise, but we do talk about the finances. We talk about what the business model is.
If you look at those authors, they are mainly academics sort of tangentially related to porn. Some of them are involved in creating porn. Some of them are people who are involved in feminist debates about porn. But, you’re right, a lot of them are in the porn industry.
We talk about what it means as far as the business model goes. How that relates to the mainstream porn industry, and how many billions of billions of dollars are sunk into that industry. And then, of course, how that changes with things like OnlyFans.
The Lemur: For my last question, and I would be remiss if I did not ask this question, do you actually watch porn in the course? And, if so, do students get a warning?
Dr. Sigal: They do get a warning at the beginning of the semester, and that warning says that if you do not see something that offends you this semester, then I’ve failed. So, you’re gonna be seeing things. You’re gonna be seeing things that offend you. Now, if that also triggers you beyond just being offended to a point where you really can’t watch this or view this, then you let me know, and we try to figure out alternatives around it.
There’s no way to figure an alternative around them seeing any porn, but there is a way of saying, “Okay, you’re gonna leave the classroom for the next 10 minutes, and then come back. You won’t have to watch it. You’ll have to be part of a discussion. But you can do some sort of alternative assignment in place of watching those things.”
And, like I said, the end of the semester assignment, most people choose to do something on porn, but I give them a bunch of other options so they can do something else as well.
The Lemur: Well, I don’t have any other questions at the moment. Thank you, Dr. Sigal for meeting with me. This was a really cool conversation.
Dr. Sigal: Absolutely.
