Hatred of Sex Talk

On March 15, 2018, I attended a talk titled “Hatred of Sex” by Tim Dean who teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. To be completely honest this presentation wasn’t nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. It certainly didn’t help that Professor Dean began by reading from his essay on the topic, which I’m sure is very good and well researched, but he used so much high-level discourse that I couldn’t follow a large amount of what he was saying. It was too scientific. For that rather unfortunate I cannot discuss the first half of Dean’s speech, but I did find the second half quite interesting.

In the second half of his speech Dean discusses the place of sex within our society. His main point was that the societal repression of sex and the representation of sex is indicative of an aversion that our society has to sex. This can be seen with the stigmatized treatment of sex educators and sex workers.

The most interesting part of Dean’s discussion to me was when he began to talk about the inherently sexual nature of power dynamics within our daily lives. Dean asserts that relationships with imbalances of power “where there is an expert there is transference”; for example, teacher-student or boss-subordinate relationships, function because there is a subconscious desire from the person with less power to please the person with more power. Here, Dean makes an interesting point and states that sexual harassment in the workplace is such a violation, not because of its sexual nature, but because it is a betrayal of the understood relationship that already exists, the trust between the subordinate and the “expert” is broken when the person with more power takes advantage of the subordinate’s desire to please their superior. I don’t disagree with this point and do find it extremely interesting to think about but I’m not sure that I believe that this is all that is at play when discussing sexual harassment especially in the workplace. I also thought it was really interesting when he briefly discussed the way rape and power free sex are espoused as polar opposites of each other when in reality the nature of sex relies quite heavily on the presence of some kind of power dynamic.

Overall I found the talk really interesting especially because the role of sex and power dynamics in society are so rarely discussed because they are topics that are seen as taboo, but I love learning about the ways our society works especially in regards to things that we don’t normally think about or say aloud. In the future, I would be really interested to see what other information Professor Dean’s research yields.