Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas

in an engaging and accessible way. It is time to talk about touch, I think. As this episode goes

out, there is hysteria about people touching one

another. I don't just mean kissing or holding or sex, but even shaking hands, even being within

a few feet of somebody. It's pretty ramped up right now. But we should remember, I think, that touch and the ways that we touch have always been troubled by definitions and rules and the metaphors that we've inherited from others. So I think it is time more than ever to talk about the ways we view touch, the ways we view intimacy, and especially

sex, and the way that we think about other people touching and images of it in pornography.

So, I invited the amazing Kate Lister, a sex historian to the show. Kate is known, probably best known for her hugely popular Twitter account

Hors of Yore, which is basically a historical compendium of desires of sexual imagery from the past,

drawings, poems, the ways that words have shifted in our culture,

all that. She's really an amazing historian, and she now has an amazing book to match her amazing

Twitter account. I just keep saying amazing, but it is true about Kate, called A Curious History of Sex. And that book is very,

very funny, as is the Twitter account. So I have followed Kate for a long time, as you hear

on this episode, and she's also followed me, and we've always been sort of interested in what

each other is doing, but we never got to sit down and talk.

So finally happened, and we really get into it.

We talk about the history of sexual imagery, the ways we touch each other, and perhaps most challengingly, challengingly, we talk about what sex is.

What is sex?

I mean, it's a worthwhile question and it does not yield an easy

answer as much as we think it might. So, and we also talk about what pornography is, which also

does not yield an easy answer. We discuss the way we all experience our sexual awakening when we discover sexual imagery.

It's actually a part of our lives that we don't really talk about a lot,

...