Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is porn historian Noelle Perdue.

Porn. I’ve noticed it referenced in the news and on social media a lot more lately because many are concerned that it’s having harmful addictive effects on us—especially on adolescents and young men. While I do think it’s important to take these concerns seriously, I think sometimes these arguments are not being made in good faith, and when they are, they’re directed at symptoms, not underlying causes.

What I’m getting at is this. What if porn is not the problem, but Western society’s post-Puritanical relationship to it? (or not so post puritanical) And what are the byproducts of a culture that not only demonizes pornography, but implicitly advocates for repressing desire, and wraps up these fears into obscenity law that harms queer, trans, nonbinary folks, and pretty much anyone else who doesn’t fit neatly within the bounds of heternormativity?

Spoiler alert: it’s not good!

This is why it felt so important to invite Noelle onto Urgent Futures. She is someone who approaches this subject with a high degree of rigor, but also an artist’s touch, translating complex ideas in accessible and sometimes even comedic ways. In the episode you’ll hear how I discovered her work through an experimental AI art project she posted about on TikTok in 2021. I even see this approach at work in her more recent project, Candy Lore, a venue for serious reviews of candy. Even though it’s not about porn at all, it gives a sense of how she’s able to take a subject that’s often dismissed as frivolous, despite being a major part of our culture, and treat it with care without losing its essential play and silliness.

Porn, sex, eroticism, and intimacy are incredibly complex, interrelated systems. Trying to address them with oversimplified mechanistic approaches represents a misunderstanding of their complexity. We need to be able to talk about these subjects openly, and create a culture and political backdrop in which it doesn’t imperil folks to talk about it honestly. It seems obvious to me that working in that direction would do more to curb the harmful effects currently being attributed to porn and the porn industry than attacking it. But if you’re unconvinced, I have one of the world’s leading experts on the subject to explain it better than I ever could.

BIO:Noelle Perdue is a writer, producer, and Internet porn historian with nearly ten years of experience working platform-side for multiple mainstream and independent adult companies. Having written everything from Food Network porn parodies to legally binding terms and conditions, much of her current work explores obscenity law and how pornography’s history can influence our digital and political futures. Noelle’s writing work has been published on Wired, Washington Post, Pornhub, Slate, Brazzers, Input, etc, she’s also been featured as an industry expert on multiple programs including the BBC, CBC, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and on Netflix's 2023 documentary Money Shot.

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Guests on Urgent Futures are experts across art, science, media, technology, AI, philosophy, economics, mathematics, anthropology, journalism, and more. We live in complex times; these are the voices who will help you orient to emerging futures.

Find video episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures.

CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.