Diving Deep with Dr. Mireille Miller-Young Transcript
On YAS Podcast, host Daisy Ducati interviews Dr. Mireille Miller-Young (UC Santa Barbara), author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, about researching Black women’s labor, representation, and sexual agency in adult media. Miller-Young discusses identifying in solidarity with sex workers, academic stigma and career pushback, and how sex workers cared for her during fieldwork as she sought to disrupt extractive research traditions. She explains developing a “Black feminist pornographic gaze,” critiques anti-porn feminism’s shallow analysis and alignment with criminalization, and connects policies like the Nordic model and FOSTA-SESTA to increased danger and deplatforming. The conversation also addresses racialized policing of massage parlors, censorship and surveillance in academia, and her argument that Black women navigate both exploitation and agency through “erotic sovereignty,” urging listeners to avoid stigma and center sex workers’ voices.
*This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors.* *This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors.* Begin transcript after opening credits.
Dr. Mireille: [00:00:00] when I first presented at a international conference of Black studies after I finished my dissertation- It created a big upset with the American feminists. Not the Brazilians. The Brazilians were like, “We get this. It’s cool.” Like, they’re much more open about sexual culture and, you know, prostitution is not criminalized in Brazil.
It’s a complex issue there, of course, around race and policing and poverty and the kind of international trade. But it’s a more open sexual culture. I was told that I didn’t deserve my degree, that I was a pervert,
Welcome to YAS Podcast, where sex workers, artists, and advocates talk about the realities of the industry
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Daisy: Hello, everyone. My name is Daisy Ducati, and I will be your host today on YAS Podcast. Thank you for being here with us. Before we get into this episode, I wanted to remind you that YAS Podcast is produced by YAS Work, a nonprofit organization dedicated to changing public perception through media.
If you love our podcast, please consider donating. Donations like yours keep this project going. Head to yaswork.org./donate. Today, we will be speaking with Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, feminist scholar, historian, and professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Miller-Young quite literally wrote the book on Black women in porn called A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, which explores Black women’s labor, representation, and sexual agency within the adult entertainment [00:02:00] industry.
So before we get started today, what are your pronouns, and do you identify as a sex worker?
Dr. Mireille: Ah, really great question. Um, I’m she, her, hers, and, uh, I do actually in a, in a– it’s both in solidarity and also in expanding the, the concept of sex workers to include people like me who are researchers and educators.
There’s a really wonderful colleague of mine who’s a professor at Georgetown, uh, Lamonda Horton Stallings, who- … wrote about the concept of being super freaks, like the song.
Daisy: Love
it.
Dr. Mireille: And,
uh, the– her, I, I was really inspired by her thinking about the way in which we all participate in this sexual racial economy- Mm-hmm
um, that also that people who are like us, educators and curators and archivists and researchers also are [00:03:00] influenced by the precarity and the stigma around sex and sex work in particular. … It affects our work. It affects our funding. It affects our opportunities, our, uh, you know, the opportunity to even publish our work and have it read by like-minded people. And so in some ways, I was always discovering that I learned, first of all, much more about feminism from the folks that I research in my book than the professors I had in the classroom in term- particularly around Black feminism and coalitional politics, right? And particularly forms of feminism that are interrogating the necessity for care work and emotional labor that is also for each other, not just- Mm-hmm
as part of the- the work that you’re doing as a sex work to pro- uh, sex worker to provide, an emotional feeling for clients or for viewers, this kind of affective connection and pleasure. Beyond [00:04:00] that, you’re also doing this emotional labor on behalf of other sex workers sometimes through organizing, sometimes through just making a space and a container for people, right?
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Um, and that, and also in, in, in speaking out and, you know- Yeah … doing interviews or writing or publishing or, all the many things that sex workers are doing to bring awareness to their human rights, and I think that, uh, I certainly have always found myself being allied and a shared place in that.
And the fact that I, as a Black woman- was researching Black women in the industry, I think gave me a unique opportunity that other researchers may not have had. And in that, a lot of the interviews I did was actually the folks that I interviewed taking care of me like cooking me food.
Daisy: Aw.
Dr. Mireille: Bringing me sleep over. I was like a poor student, inviting me [00:05:00] things, introducing me to everybody. Um- Yep … you know, really-
Daisy: That’s sex workers.
Dr. Mireille: Lending me their outfits and advice. I’m like, it was just a ton of things, and I felt profoundly cared for. They did my hair even. Like, like I- Love it
I felt really d- who– They wouldn’t do that to, you know, Richard or Dick the anthropologist, right? Like- Yeah. … the white guy who comes in and, you know, um, like the kind of colonizing professorial, tradition that we have of looking at others and being in a position of power as the researcher over the natives or whatever.
I didn’t want that. I wanted to disrupt that. I tried to come really as open-minded as, and as a learner. Not bringing judgment about what people’s politics should be how they should act. I was really curious to what people’s experience were. I came with a really open mind, and in the process, I learned so much, including that I’m [00:06:00] implicated in the struggle, you know-
Daisy: Yeah
Dr. Mireille: as someone who brought, uh, porn stars to the classroom or-
Daisy: Mm-hmm …
Dr. Mireille: took seven years to publish my book because of the pushback from different academics not believing in the project. Yeah. And one of the critiques I had was that I was too sympathetic and biased,
Daisy: wow …
Dr. Mireille: you know, and I wasn’t objective enough as a researcher, and it was, like really interesting to hear that, that this is a, things have changed a lot in the last 10 years, and my book- Yeah … came out in 2014, but it took, again, it… I started the project, I think, in, um, the year 2000, published it in 2014. So there was that 14-year- Wow … period of working on the project.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: And still, you know, being involved in-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: the work. Sorry, that was a long answer to earlier.
Daisy: No, that’s… And it’s, I- it’s interesting because I consider you a part of the sex work community.
Dr. Mireille: Thank you.
Daisy: [00:07:00] And I can see the connection of how your work affects our work, and how our work affects your work as well.
Dr. Mireille: You know, it’s interesting, when my book came out the next year in 2015, I won two prizes for it, which blew my mind because I was treated as such an outsider.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: I never thought I would win the top prizes in American studies- Wow … and women’s studies.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: I mean, I was shocked. And, um, but I had a baby who was, well, he was one years old at the time. And back then in American studies there was no option for childcare at the conferences.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Um, so I had him there, and, uh, I think I found somebody to watch him for an hour during my, my panel.
But when it was the awards ceremony, I had him there, and I was like, had him on my hip. No one had seen- Yeah … anything like that.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: They were just like, “Wait, do you have a child?” Like, it was so anti-child in a way, and anti-parent. Um-
Daisy: Wow …
Dr. Mireille: but it was hard to even be [00:08:00] there to celebrate my book.
And I, I thought that, you know, uh, it was interesting ’cause it was people who were professors from graduate school at New York University back in the ’90s-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: all the way to colleagues and students of mine who were graduate students or finishing graduate students. So it was an incredible moment, and I remember, I think I g- I gave a speech, but I was so out of it.
But I was also very tired at that time as a mom. And I was trying to-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: like pull up my girdle, and my boobs were wanting to milk, and I was like, it’s just… It was one of those things where you have to pull it together, and it’s really hard sometimes, uh, as a woman-identified person and, and body to navigate certain worlds when including sex work and including academe. I think they have a lot in common.
Daisy: Yeah. That, the intersectionality of different identities, like, definitely compounds the, the things- Mm-hmm … you have to deal with and [00:09:00] navigate. So let’s, let’s back up a little bit. For our listeners who may be discovering your work for the first time, how do you usually describe what you do and the focus of your research?
Dr. Mireille: Ah, that’s great. You know, it’s funny, I’ve been doing it for so long, but I, I think I never gave the same answer twice.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: I’m always trying to find, like, what is it I do and how do I say it? Uh-
Daisy: It’s evolving.
Dr. Mireille: It’s always… Yeah, it always, it never seems kind of static. Or my understanding doesn’t seem static. But, my research, I was trained as a historian in African diaspora studies and US history. And, um, I came at this project out of a time where I was exploring Black feminism and also came upon a class that was about pornography and the feminist sex wars.
And what I found was that, uh, in all, the only commentary that I’d seen on pornography from Black feminists was from a few speeches and essays from the [00:10:00] ’70s during the Take Back the Night movement, which was- Hmm
an anti-violence movement led by-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: feminists and feminists of color. And they grouped pornography, including Alice Walker’s part of that. She’s, you know, she wrote essays as well really equating pornography to a kind of, uh, misogyny and anti-Blackness. And then I was reading- Hmm … classic works by people like Patricia Hill Collins uh, Black feminist thought, and saw the, where she’s describing pornography as another matrix of domination.
But what I noticed- Hmm … was that, Nobody had actually talked to sex workers or analyzed a film or talked about anything specific.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And they talked about it as if it didn’t have a history.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Where did it come from? What’s the industry about? And what’s been Black women’s role in it? So I guess to describe what I’m, what I’ve always been interested in is, um, uh, Black women sexuality, their history- and the ways in which they are represented in visual culture, um, from art, from, [00:11:00] you know, Western art traditions and African art traditions to film, television, now digital culture. And pornography being a genre of visual culture and media really fascinated me. So I think, in a way I, I became a pornography scholar or what they call porn scholars,
Daisy: yeah
Dr. Mireille: which was a new thing at the time. And, uh, not many people were embracing it, right? Uh, and they were- Yeah … mostly film scholars, so they were like talking about representation in a very abstract way, drawing on, psychoanalytic structures of the gaze and the v- the male gaze and things like this.
But it wasn’t, uh, it wasn’t really also attending to race and labor. Mm-hmm. And I was interested in labor as well, being raised by a Black woman who was a phone company worker, single mother, only child in New York City. And a big [00:12:00] part of my life was being on the strike, on the picket line with her, uh, because she-
Daisy: Wow
Dr. Mireille: you know, she worked for New York Telephone at a time where they had several strikes when I was young or an adolescent, and I was-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: I was on the picket lines with her after school.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: And, uh, there was a famous, um, strike I remember when it was New York Telephone or NYNEX, it was c- called, we called it On The Line in ’89.
And, um, I enjoyed it because I loved being there to yell, “Scab!” when people walked by into the building. That was my favorite part.
Daisy: I love it.
Dr. Mireille: And I was like allowed, it was like being allowed to curse, you know?
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And so I’m yelling, “Scab!” And then at some point it’s like a group of men come and they’re all in suits.
And ev- I didn’t notice that everyone got quiet. So I’m yelling, I’m yelling, “Scab, scab!” And I’m, ’cause I’m the only voice, they turn and look at me. And then I see they’re looking at me and I was like, we had been on strike for like four months, so it was like my mom would make big pots of [00:13:00] beans and for the week.
And I was really tired of this being broke thing. We were always broke, but especially during strikes. So I, I yelled, “Shame on you! I’m do- I’m down to my last chin.” I’m starving.” And they looked at me like, “What?” They were so confused.
Daisy: Oh my goodness.
Dr. Mireille: And then they go in the building, and don’t you know, the strike ended the next day. And all my mom’s friends were like, said, you know, I think I was like 11 or 12 at the time, that I, I should get the credit for ending the strike because that happened to be the CEO of Nynex that I was– that looked at me.
Daisy: Amazing.
Dr. Mireille: That was the head of the company. I didn’t know. The funny thing is my mom retired- Finally got through my mom retired like two years later, and he came to the retirement party.
Daisy: What?
Dr. Mireille: He was like, “I remember your daughter.”
Daisy: How cute.
Dr. Mireille: It was really funny. So I was supposed to be saying, “Who am I? What do I do?” This is like the longest [00:14:00] answer. I care about Black women’s histories, their experience, their representation, but not only, how they’re seen, but how they perform, how they labor, whether they think about it, their pleasure, their embodiment politics.
Um, that’s the center of my work and everything that it relates to that in terms of visual culture and art history and political economy and the sex industry and, um, trans studies, queer cinema. All of these things have been– I’ve drew in and kind of had to weave together-
In a project and in a body of work because no one had put them together.
And it was always a need to create this bricolage of, uh, different fields To explore, a history that isn’t easily captured or at least presented in archives. Um, when I went to, for example, the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, they have a really extensive archive of porn.
But most of it you can’t access because they don’t have the funding [00:15:00] to transfer it. And they keep it in like environmentally protected storage. Yeah. But without the funding it’s like sitting there. But when I first went I was still– I was watching old porn films on the reels-
Daisy: Wow …
Dr. Mireille: and they were disintegrating as I’m watching it.
Daisy: Oh, wow.
Dr. Mireille: So then later they transferred it to like DVD and we had VHS and you had to sit there watching like porn with the other researchers there. It’s kinda funny. But nobody had actually categorized anything according to race. I had boxes and boxes of photographs and I’m going through black and white photographs from the 1800s looking for Black skin, brown skin, anything.
Like it was a lot of that just like where are we-
…
Dr. Mireille: In the archive? Where are we? And trying to put stories together from finding, uh, the little blue books of New Orleans brothels that m-mention some mulatta ladies to Yeah … harlem Renaissance references to buffet flats and sex parties and [00:16:00] even Malcolm X’s biography with Alex Haley, he talks about bringing white people to Harlem for sex parties and having done sex work himself.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And these are things that are not ever, addressed- Mm-hmm … in the proper areas of Black history. Um- Yeah … and as feminist or not, just, you know, it’s, it’s kind of- Just … still taboo to talk about. Yeah. And, uh, I think I’ve been always interested in the taboo areas of study.
Daisy: So one thing I really appreciate about your work is that you treat sex workers as thinkers and workers and not just subjects.
Was that an intentional choice from the beginning of your research process?
Dr. Mireille: Yeah. Absolutely. Part of it was just naturally instinctual for me because I treated them like, like anybody I would. Like respect, that’s how I was raised. But um- I was very motivated ’cause I was [00:17:00] told, uh, being a history department, “Just make the study historical.
Just look at the old stuff and be done there. Don’t make it contemporary. Don’t talk to people who are actually alive today.” And I was like, “You know, but I can’t find those people from the ’20s and ’30s.” Yeah. I don’t know what… I can look and analyze, but I really wanna know, you know, what people feel, because I think that contemporary people can give insight on looking at the past.
Yeah.
You know? And help me develop a way to to observe people’s performance, to look for moments of pleasure or disgust or frustration or exhaustion or these things, right?
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And it really did help me, um, gain that, that methodology and view, and what I learned is that I came as a Black feminist and dev- and received from Black feminists and developed a methodology that I call in the book is, a Black feminist pornographic gaze. And I identified [00:18:00] myself with being an academic pornographer and using this method as a way to read exactly those tensions, the, the resistance and the possibility for pleasure even in-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: the archival past, right?
And to see that if you just look at representation It’s hard to know really what’s going on in porn films, right?
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: You, you just can’t take things at p- face value.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: There is a part in this scene-
Daisy: It’s inherently a performance.
Dr. Mireille: It’s a performance. But people for some reason take it literally.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: You know? And, uh, you know, if you’re smiling gagging on a dick, like they think, “Well, she must like it.” But you don’t know if that was set up to be like, “Please gag a lot because this is-” you know, all about that. And you don’t know, maybe she is because she likes working with that actor.
Like, it could be so many things, and I learned from being on set for years- and going to just being in intimate spaces in people’s homes and parties and things for, [00:19:00] um, you know, in intimate ways that, that it’s not static and it’s very complex. And that it’s like, mm, a lot of work sites and a lot of Hollywood sets.
It really depends- on the, uh, the space, the container that the directors created, that the producers created, the budget, if people feel- supported with makeup and costume. If they- … have, a comfortable place to be. Or i- is it, is it like in some random house or motel with some guys with a camera and- Yeah
they’re like, “Yeah, we’re gonna get to the,” you know, and like, you know, pretend, you know, you’re standing by the trash can and, you know, you just pick me up. The, it’s clearly- Yeah … a difference in the kinds of films that you can be in. And, um- Mm-hmm … for some reason, it’s time everyone thought everything’s gonzo and it’s just all exactly what it seems.
But even we know with reality TV, it’s not what it seems. Yeah. It is edited to look like- And some of
it’s completely scripted.
Exactly. Exactly. You know? And so they, that’s what I thought the kind of, um, so much of the critique and including feminist critique of [00:20:00] pornography was so shallow and so uninformed- Yeah
and so like, mediocre in terms of like lacking of rigorous interpretation or of the material. And, uh, and also the fact that they really didn’t talk to people.
Yeah.
And I’ve been to presentations where there are people presenting on pornography, presenting on Black women, on my stuff. Yeah.
These are white women that I had to say, “What are you doing? And stop.”
Stay in your lane.
Daisy: You don’t speak for us. Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: You don’t speak for us. You don’t know the theory. You don’t, you don’t, shouldn’t talk to s- Yeah Yeah.
Daisy: Wow.
And
Dr. Mireille: they were offended by that, it w- it’s real talk. Like, you’re gonna do damage if you continue.
Yeah.
Like, don’t. And but I had seen them do less research than my undergrads, a bad undergrad. Like, I have- Yeah. … amazing undergrads. But, uh, who do really great research, including right now I’m teaching a sex work class, and I’m really proud of the work they’re doing. Um-
Daisy: Yes.
Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: So we’re doing, we’re doing a lot of work right now looking at massage parlors and the new ordinance in Santa Barbara that’s- Mm
being pushed [00:21:00] through to increase the licensure fees and make it harder for people to get licenses. It’s a way to target the Asian community in a time of ICE, um- Yeah … and, and to do kind of sexual morality cleanup in a way that’s racial profiling, and not at all about making supposed trafficked victims safer.
It never is. It’s a, it’s a deportation pipeline, essentially. Yeah. And the fact that feminists think that they’re doing somebody a favor by saving them and rescuing them is, is frustrating. So- Yeah … you know, the students are even picking up on that. Like, you know, like, they’re just like what, uh, you know, what is that?
So, and we’re gonna get to meet some of the folks who’ve been organizing around this in Santa Barbara as well. So it, you know what? It, this hands-on thinking about how policy and, um, s- you know, labor conditions affect real people’s lives, and how- Mm-hmm … it’s always already racialized and classed, and how we have to think about where [00:22:00] are the critiques coming from and what kind of politics do they serve?
Yeah. The anti-pornography feminists for a long time were sharing space with Christian evangelicals-
…
In t- in terms of having the same argument about wanting to criminalize pornography. And I remember at that presentation where the woman I told off about doing Black women- Yeah … ’cause her answer was that we should criminalize pornography, and I was like, but you’re talk- but okay then, so how are the community that you’re writing about gonna be affected if you criminalize pornography?
Specifically, you’re talking about Black people who have been hyper-policed, and now you wanna extend policing into something that’s legal.
Yeah.
She didn’t have an answer for that because that’s, that’s their con- perception is that the sex industry needs to be stopped. Mm-hmm. And the method for that is to criminalize it.
Daisy: Geez.
Dr. Mireille: Now, we have different methods around the world. We have the Nordic model, which people push because it seems friendlier. Mm-hmm. It’s not about criminalizing the workers as much as the clients. However, that backfired tremendously if you [00:23:00] talk to any Nordic feminists or- Yeah … Canadian feminists, because it’s been pushed there that criminalizing the clients just took away all the safe clients who didn’t wanna- Mm-hmm
take a risk being criminalized, the married husbands who’d come every Thursday afternoon, right?
Yeah.
And it left the people who are willing to take a risk, who are the dangerous ones.
Yeah.
Who are the ones who don’t wanna use a condom, who are the ones who don’t respect boundaries and nos, and, um, it made life a lot harder, right?
Daisy: And the, those kinda laws make screening harder as well.
Dr. Mireille: Absolutely, just like FOSTA-SESTA.
Yeah.
Which was, you know-
Daisy: Oh, don’t get me started …
Dr. Mireille: the fight online sexual trafficking statute. Right. Which in 2018, pushed by two Republicans including a woman. Yeah. Um, again, in this interest of, uh, treating pornography as a public health crisis that needs some kind of, not just like medicalization intervention because of addiction, male addiction is- Mm.
Mm … this concern that somehow, you know, so much pornography is going to take away men’s ability to, to be good [00:24:00] fathers and husbands.
I’m sorry, they’ve been failing at that- … on their own. Like, it has nothing to do with anything, right? Yeah. Um, but that, you know, that’s part of this, you know, you know, be a good man. And even, um, remember, uh, what’s his name? Um, uh, I almost called him Ja- Jared Kushner. What Mila Kunis and that guy,
Daisy: Oh,
um-
Dr. Mireille: the actor …
Daisy: ashton Kutcher.
Dr. Mireille: Ashton Kutcher. I was like Jared Kushner. Yeah. Cleaned it up. Different. Shit. Him and, um, Justin Timberlake used to do these ads about real men, real men don’t abuse women, and then we turn- it turned out that they’re, like, part of this trafficking, Hollywood trafficking ring.
Yeah. Anyway, on a whole nother thing. But the online… this policy changed the law around s- section 203 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows the government to sue [00:25:00] platforms if- Mm-hmm … they think they’re facilitating sex trafficking. And all it did was really push people’s free speech off the table in social media spaces, and make it- Yeah
a lot harder for sex workers to survive and to also to organize and to keep each other safe.
Yeah.
But, uh, also anybody who wanted to have sexual content, uh- Yeah … any bit of nudity, including pl- many Black plus size models were taken offline because the algorithm was reading the fleshiness, even though where they were clothed, but the algorithm was reading them as naked.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: So they were deplatformed, you know? And, uh, meanwhile-
Daisy: It’s just non-consensual sexualization …
Dr. Mireille: we’re dealing with the manosphere. Right, right, but the, and, and but then they get to be the incel manosphere people- Ugh … with literally no limits, you know? Yeah. Nobody’s taking them when even though that’s a form of violence, what they’re doing.
Uh- Yeah … so yeah, it’s really frustrating because the police and anyone will tell you, it made it [00:26:00] harder to find trafficked victims, like to figure- Yeah … out where people are. Now it’s driven much more on the dark web, and it’s scary times, you know? It’s, n- it’s, it played a role definitely into, uh, the wider interest in online surveillance and in policing sexuality online.
Yeah. You know, and sexual speech. So- Yeah … um, sex workers always seem to be the vanguard or the front line of those, frameworks and when they get implemented towards criminalizing, surveilling, policing, disciplining populations. And people don’t believe it’s going to reach them because it’s, “Oh, it’s just them.”
Yeah. “They’re so deviant and marginal, and of course they need to be controlled and, you know, make sure that they’re safe, but they’re also not getting out of hand.” But then all of a sudden it reaches, you know, your protest against ICE, and they know everything that you’ve done online and everything- Yeah
that you say. And I actually was reminded today, I have a couple students who are [00:27:00] inter- international students in my sex work class- … who come from the UK or Ireland or whatever, and I think one from France. They said that when they came on a student visa to spend the year at UCSB, they were made to give all their social media contacts as part of the immigration-
Yeah
process, right?
Daisy: That’s the new thing I’ve been hearing about.
Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And you can have your phone taken and looked through. So they were saying that they deleted all their stuff around Donald Trump just in case. Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, and so these things I feel are very much connected.
Daisy: And that’s so wild that just having an opinion about something can bar you from entering the country.
Dr. Mireille: Right.
Daisy: You know?
Yeah. Yeah,
Dr. Mireille: and like, it, it’s somehow we went, uh, that became normalized through these little incremental things, right? And making it seem like, oh, we, we need to, um, protect the public. We need to make sure that, apps are secure and are US-based. This is the whole TikTok [00:28:00] thing.
Yeah. They just put, like, the major government contractor and put Palantir and Oracle on all of that. And basically, they just admitted that even Doge is all data mining, and- Yep … data mining and selling and using it for police surveillance and immigration control and drone strikes and, how to train AI, right?
Daisy: Yep.
Dr. Mireille: So I’m actually working on a project now that’s about how to train AI to be good at sex. And, and, um- I love it … nobody’s talking about this. And-
Daisy: I love it …
Dr. Mireille: I keep going to things, they keep talking about the AI companions and how they’re just lo- good lovers and friends, and people are losing touch. And I’m like, “Okay, but you’re acting like nobody’s using it for s- everybody’s using it for sex.
Hello.” Yeah. But also, but also, it’s so policed, and as soon as you’re getting- Mm-hmm … you know, into it here it comes. I’m not allowed to say that,
yeah.
And, uh, but yet it knows that you’re over 18 because it has your credit card, right? It’s like it knows. You know, [00:29:00] we’ve already done all this, but why can’t we, can’t adults have sexual culture that’s not policed?
And, um- Yeah … so I’m thinking around policy solutions for that because, and also creative solutions for that because many of these, you know, the major platforms all would take a kind of anti-sex stand unless it’s very specialized into here’s a sex bot that is limited in some way for, for creepy men.
You know, like it’ll look
like that, yeah. But what’s for everybody else? And, um, anyway, I had a fun time with that project, but it was very controversial, and I got in trouble at my university for, for talking about it in my classes.
Daisy: Wow. Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: They were like, um, “You can’t talk about your personal life your love affair with your AI lover.”
And I was like, “You mean my project?”
Daisy: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Dr. Mireille: My project? Do you know who you’re talking to? I was like, “I showed porn the other day.” Now [00:30:00] you’re taking… Like, that’s a problem? And it was like that, and, um, a complaint that I’d said I was tired in class. Like, I teach 300 people sometimes in these big lecture halls, and-
Yeah
sometimes it’s after lunch, and people are like… Yeah. I’m trying to be the one with the microphone being all la, la, la, you know? But we’re also human, and I thought feminism, uh, talked about the personal is political anyway.
Daisy: Right.
Dr. Mireille: Right? So it’s a time where Black studies, feminist studies, all ethnic studies is, um, being diminished, dismantled.
And the freedom of speech that we’ve traditionally tried to have, particularly around issues around colonialism, imperialism, sexual violence, things that the university is very uneasy about. And then when I say my university, I mean the uni- the academy more broadly- Yeah … in the United States is very touchy about things that they feel that they may get in trouble for, that they could be legally liable for.
Um- Yeah … and they don’t really… [00:31:00] They’re just really mostly interested in covering their ass. Uh, and so right now- Yeah … around the country, people like me are being silenced and told “Hand over your syllabus. We have to approve your readings. We have to approve what you’re lecturing about.”
Mm.
Um, even people in philosophy were told, “Don’t teach Plato if you talk about race and gender.”
Daisy: Huh.
Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Dr. Mireille: And, uh, I think since, um, there’s been over 200, I think a close to 300 faculty that have lost their tenure or their positions in the past year and a half. Many also were connected to Gaza and the protests, but-
Yeah …
most were around Charlie Kirk and talking about the, the critique of- Yeah
this man who clearly advocated gun violence and, or the right to have gun violence the normalization of gun violence, And the importance of the Second Amendment over children’s lives, right? Yeah. [00:32:00] And then, what happens, whoever hit him shot him, we- nobody thinks it’s who they say it is, of course.
Um, But it’s never. It’s never that. It’s just like, oh, another lone wolf. Really? Okay, whatever. It’s like, okay. Oh, so many lone wolves at the CIA. But anyway, but like the thing is, you know, so they were like they, you know, like people talking about that, and they’ve lost their jobs. In Indiana, they had, um, rep- like people could report to their town and their city i- if the, if their professor or teachers talked about it.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: And also if they didn’t lower the flag in honor.
I know. I know.
I know. I know. And, um, and, and then it’s, just anything that they think. But now it is using this idea, this threat of critical race theory and DEI and all of these, um-
Daisy: Yep …
Dr. Mireille: these concepts and fields of study that they don’t understand.
They don’t even know what it is. If you a- sat them down and say, “What [00:33:00] is it?” And just don’t interrupt, just wait
They can’t. They can’t explain what they hate.
They’re just afraid of it. They’re afraid of wokeism. They’re afraid of educated, empowered people of color who’ve had enough. That’s what they’re afraid of.
Daisy: It’s kind of like-
Um,
mm-hmm … the, the concept of communism, if we actually just defined it without calling it communism, most people- Right
would agree about it.
Dr. Mireille: That’s right. That’s right, and that’s, uh, the anti-capitalist work that’s being done is, uh, in the university is about teaching people about income inequality poverty, structural racism, and how that, uh, intertwines with poverty, the racial wealth gap. The critical race theory emerged from work by Black feminists to talk about whiteness as property- Mm
whiteness as the ability to to trade in privilege, and that the ways in which [00:34:00] Blackness became the mana- for whiteness property to manage. And so we you know, the way in which we need to understand the political economy of the West as being intimately tied to the development of race and the development of private property around racial privilege, right?
And not only private property, but the right to vote and other things that are attended with that. And so, that’s why it was dangerous, right? But it’s taught at UCLA Law. They have an intersectionality and law program that I’ve had students go to. It’s one of the, the only ones in the country, in the world, and it’s brilliant.
And a lot of people- Yeah … that go through that become public defenders, who are so needed.
Daisy: Amazing.
Dr. Mireille: You know? Yeah. They’re doing important work, but none of the people who are critical of this can really define it or why they have a problem with it. But we know what happens when they dismantle it.
What we get is- Mm-hmm … DeSantis requiring history teachers to teach that slavery was also good for the [00:35:00] slaves, you know, because they learned important skills. Yeah.
Daisy: Geez.
Dr. Mireille: Right, so, that African American studies taken off AP exams, that you have to teach the other side of any field.
But you know what’s interesting to me, just came out this week, was, um, the head, I can’t remember his name, but the, you know, the lead conceptualizer of Project 2025 actually wrote a PhD and passed his PhD on Black slave culture and s- cultural resilience in Louisiana. Hmm. And it’s a very, it’s a very understanding, it’s very sympathetic, it’s a very rigorous dissertation.
I looked at it and I was like-
Yeah … “
Wait.” And people are like, “See? Like, they, um, they study us so they can, you know, dominate us.” But I just, something about it bothered me, like- How do you go from that? How do you go from having that level of 200 books deep and archival research deep at least, uh- Yeah … to [00:36:00] write a dissertation on Black culture and resilience, and then be an architect that seeks to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, which is what happened this past week.
Yeah. It is- I told my students, and they were like, “Huh?” Because they don’t watch the news or read anything. They don’t know- Yeah … what’s going on. I was like,
Daisy: “You realize that-“
Dr. Mireille: The news is too daunting these days.
Yeah, even for me, I can’t watch it. I’d rather watch my psychics and, uh, my tarot readers.
It gives me peace. Mm. Yeah. I do my binaural beats. Just, you know, take me out of here. Just DMT my pineal gland. Just- … blow it out the park.
Yeah. Da,
Da, da, da, da, da.
Daisy: It’s getting too real.
Dr. Mireille: That’s all I can handle right now, so. But yeah. It’s a, it’s a crazy world.
Yeah. So real quick, we’re gonna take a little break, and we’ll be right back in just a moment after this message.
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Daisy: And we are back with YAS Podcast. I am here with Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, and let’s talk a little bit more about your book, A Taste for Brown Sugar.
So in A Taste for Brown Sugar, you talk about Black women navigating both exploitation and agency. Why do you think mainstream conversations struggle to hold both of these truths at the same time?
Dr. Mireille: Wow, that’s a wonderful question. Thank you
Yeah. When I approached the topic, it seemed that, uh, there were two sides of feminism that were not talking to each other. They [00:38:00] actually had broken the late ’70s and early ’80s over what’s called the sex wars or the porn wars. Mm. And it really was a, an argument over this issue of pornography. Yeah. And it became that pornography– At first, the, a lot of the movement was about sexual exploitation in a wider media culture, and then it kind of focused in on pornography as, like, the most profound or deep example of misogynistic culture by those activists.
Mm. And at the same time, you had queer Trans, sex worker, folks of color who had always been on a different side than, well, weren’t as close to the s- anti-sexual violence feminists, were more aligned in talking about BDSM, about gender resistance, about gay rights, about, uh, sexual culture, were more experimental.
It [00:39:00] included artists, it included performers, activists, and other people who were involved in sexual communities that are seen as extra taboo, right? So queer and kink communities, including academics who are part of those communities who are writing about that. And I was trained by one of them named Lisa Duggan, who started out as a journalist, but was a lesbian who very vocal about sexual liberation and freedom for queer people.
And their question i- was that your entire analysis about misogyny doesn’t attend to queerness. It’s you know, your, your analysis depends on the idea of the female performer and the f- the male viewer. Meanwhile, in pornography, there’s huge other sectors of gay porn for men and gay porn ma- for women, including- Yeah
made by women, including- Yeah … people who are already in the industry who are making that porn, who are, like Candida Royalle and Annie Sprinkle and Carol [00:40:00] Queen, and they had magazines-
Daisy: I love them …
Dr. Mireille: and they had a whole culture, right? Yeah. Of On Our Backs magazine, right? And, um, which was, you know, a play with off our backs, like pushing back on the idea that you know, we need to denature sexuality in some way to be feminists, right?
And saying, uh, you know, it was a really direct cri- critique and kind of war that happened over this. And, and I felt uh, I was inspired by the cool side in a way because- Yeah … I identified with, you know, the sexual rebels and, um, you know, the rabble-rousers and others who never fit into what theorist Gayle Rubin called the charm circle.
And- Yeah … which is, you know, the kind of sexuality that’s allowed, which is procreative, monogamous, coupled, not for money not using pornography or sex toys or anything. It’s just very vanilla And meanwhile, everybody else on the outside who’s interested in all the other things are [00:41:00] outsiders to the norm.
Yeah. And, uh, and there’s, there’s, uh, real consequences to that position. Whether you’re, uh, it’s medicalization, being seen as, you know, medically outside the norm, legally outside the norm educationally outside the norm, socially outside of the norm, right? Not having a voice in many of these domains.
And so, uh, in my book, I was very interested in inserting this critique, but again, no one had talked to Black women. And- Yeah … so much of Black feminism, uh, you know, the work that I was reading from Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks and Patricia Hill Collins and Barbara so I was reading, um, inspiring work that was about, by Black feminists, about the importance of recovering our power and our voice and our history and our [00:42:00] bodies, right?
Our pleasures and our vulnerabilities. And I didn’t see a space where Black feminist sex workers were invited to the conversation. And every time that I spoke to people about pornography, the assumption was that the people in it are trafficked, are abused, brought there by a pimp, basically the, all the stereotypes.
They f- they fell off the bus and got in down the wrong lane. It was almost inconceivable that I would call such people feminists, right? And at the time when I was starting this work I would say that there was a lot of respectability politics, uh, in Black history, Black studies, Black feminism.
And when I first presented at a international conference of Black studies after I finished my dissertation- [00:43:00] It created a big upset with the American feminists. Not the Brazilians. The Brazilians were like, “We get this. It’s cool.” Like, they’re much more open about sexual culture and, you know, prostitution is not criminalized in Brazil.
It’s a complex issue there, of course, around race and policing and poverty and the kind of international trade. But it’s a more open sexual culture. I was told that I didn’t deserve my degree, that I was a pervert,
it was very controversial for a lot of the American scholars, Black feminist scholars at the time. And, um, it really, uh, struck me that one, they thought that I was overstating or over-imagining that Black women could have agency at all in pornography.
Daisy: Wow.
Dr. Mireille: Only ever exploitative, and everybody who’s in it must be false conscious, you know, about their emp- like being [00:44:00] empowered or, you know, or not.
And so they saw me as very naive in a way. Like, “Oh, she’s so young and naive. She thinks like, those women are empowered,” right? And it was ma- they were making fun of me. They rejected-
Daisy: Oh.
Dr. Mireille: There were many places I was not invited to or couldn’t apply for a job, and every time I would apply-
Daisy: Wow
Dr. Mireille: I would get attacked during the Q&A by, uh, people who are very, uh… it’s very, it’s a very emotional topic often, uh- Yeah … for a lot of scholars to talk about racism and sexism when you identify and it affects you as a person of color or somebody who shares that politics. So I understand because I get quite emotional too.
And but I’ve, I’ve felt along the way that I had, I was defending my own integrity as a scholar, um, as well as the people that I write about. Yeah. Because I was like, you don’t even know these pe- wouldn’t s- like y- I don’t even know if you’ve watched porn before, but like I [00:45:00] don’t know if you’ve ever talked to anyone.”
Yeah. But these assumption you’re making you wouldn’t make about any other research topic, that there’s just already some politic, like it’s impossible for Black farmers in the South to be communist. Like my, my, my co- um, my mentor wrote a book on that, you know? Yeah. Uh, the kind of Black labor movement among farmers and the Communist Party and their alliance with white-
Daisy: Wow
Dr. Mireille: or whites in the process against labor.
Daisy: What was the book called? Do you know?
Dr. Mireille: Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley.
Daisy: I’m gonna have to look that up ’cause-
It’s
Dr. Mireille: really great. And then he also wrote about hip hop. And before people were writing about hip hop, he was writing about the kind of work of N.W.A.
and, and other rappers who were critiquing the police and- Mm … actually analyzing their lyrics and talking about the political
importance of hip hop back in the ’90s when people still was like, “What do you mean political importance?” Yeah. It was so controversial, and often people were like, uh, “Oh, if it’s, um-” you [00:46:00] know, anti-police or if it was on the other hand like Uncle Luke and not, uh, you know, the kind of, uh, hypersexual, uh- Yeah
party hip-hop that there could be nothing useful about it. And so, I come from a training of scholars who didn’t take that for granted and thought that wherever Black people make culture, there’s politics to it, and there’s critique, and there’s embodiment and ownership. And wherever we are, we do us.
Like, it’s like, you know? Yeah. But, you know, so it’s like, and if we, if you can see our agency when we were, um, forced to be slaves and/or, or made to be housemaids, right? Mm-hmm. If we can imagine that and we can listen to Fannie Lou Hamer talking about, “I’m sick and I’m tired,” and get it- Yeah … you know?
Why can’t we listen with nuance to the stories- Mm-hmm … of Black sex workers, including women in porn? So it was– I thought I knew I was right, but it was just such a lack of support that, you know, [00:47:00] later when the book was celebrated, I was just like, “Where have you all been?” Like, “I’ve been so alone.”
And- Yeah … now there are people who’ve gone to college or gra- and grad school who’ve gotten their degree because of my book, and I was, like, celebrated in the fall, uh, at a conference about pleasure, The Audacity of Pleasure at,
Daisy: Amazing …
Dr. Mireille: Colorado, Denver, and no, Boulder, sorry. And it was fabulous, and it was amazing to see all these kind of young academics who, who came up on, on the work that I had done already to make a space for that, a kind of, a queer political space for the, within Black sexual deviant culture.
And I was inspired by, um, Cathy Cohen, who’s a really brilliant, uh, Black feminist, uh, uh, political scientist from University of Chicago. And she had a book, or I mean, an article that she had written about the political importance of [00:48:00] looking at Black deviance. And that really inspired me. If we really wanna understand Langston Hughes, we really wanna- Yeah
understand the Harlem Renaissance, we need to attend to its queerness, right? Mm-hmm. If we really wanna understand the politics of HIV/AIDS or, uh, ballroom culture, we need to attend to Black queerness. Yeah. Or-
Yeah …
she was arguing also, if you wanna understand the welfare queen and the, how that myth impacts, uh, Black women in poverty, you need to attend to queerness because like Black queers, the kind of sexualization of the Black poor mother figure that is the welfare queen share this common deviance that’s linked to their sexuality and race, right?
And so they, they become simultaneously, you know, sexualized outsider figures. And I would add, I was adding the Black sex worker to that configuration. And I’m really proud of it, and I, I think in, when I finished the book and I wrote the preface, I, um, I said I, I proudly claim the title now of being a [00:49:00] pervert and an academic pornographer because, uh, you know, I think that, uh, we deserve sexual freedom of articulation in any industry under capital is exploitative and racist, misogynist, sexist, and anti-humane in a way that- Yeah
the body is expected to work, right? The body is, is used as the capital that the emotional and physical labor involved. My mom worked herself to the bone in the phone company. My grandfather worked in the steel mill, right? My grandmo- grandmother worked in a toy factory. They all worked themselves to an early grave.
Mm-hmm. And, and, and it’s, I don’t see really, you know, why that would be a better, more– just because it’s more respectable work- … right, to labor in and that we could look at how my mother stood up to anti-labor policy at the phone company, or all these people who did these really important things to push and create, new conditions, better conditions for [00:50:00] workers.
We need to attend to how Black women are doing that, too. And I was also interested in, in the concept of pleasure and what it might mean. Like why people are motivated there, to go there. And so I came up with, mostly what people had told me in my research were money, sex, and fame were big things.
Yeah. But I really wanted to break that down. Like, what do we mean by money? Well, we mean that it’s a flexible income, right? Mm-hmm. That it’s, it’s lucrative, much more lucrative than the majority of service work that Black women find themselves in. Mm-hmm. Including teaching. It’s sometimes on parallel or more than nursing, and I’ve known plenty of Black nurses who became porn stars.
Mm-hmm. And
when I asked them, “Why would you le- you know, leave such a respectable job?” Someone like Diana DeVoe, who was a star for a long time from the late ’90s to the early 2000s, and then became a very, uh, active director for many companies. Yeah. She had, she had done [00:51:00] teaching, you know, a very respectable field.
And, you know, people said because it was pleasurable, also, the one nurse that I interviewed said, “As a nurse, I was dealing with death all the time.”
Hmm.
Mm-hmm. “
Daisy: And
Dr. Mireille: porn, I was feeling alive. I was dealing with life.” Yeah. Sex is… Right? So it was like, w- wow. Like you know? Yeah. When, when you break down what does money mean, it means, you know, the, the capacity to be sovereign, um- Mm-hmm
in your time and your choices and how you use your body, which Black women haven’t always had, right? Yeah. But I- then you look at historically, back to the Depression Era, because my research starts in the 1800s.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Really thinking about the pornography of the auction block as- Hmm … as, the visualization of Black women as sexualized enslaved people has in a direct relationship to the kinds of pornography that’s been created and the conditions that Black women have been under.
Daisy: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Mireille: But I found really interesting [00:52:00] old films and things like that where the women were showing themselves in ways, like beautiful outfits, like showing patent leather shoes and gorgeous makeup, and they were performing, doing tricks and eye things like Josephine Baker, right? They were- Yeah
showing that they’re very aware of Black stardom, how to perform on camera, that they cared about their beauty, right? That they c- they cared about how they were seen. So they had a certain standard of, of for themselves. And I really thought as well that it’s interesting to note that during the Depression, many Black women became sex workers at a time that became criminalized to survive, when they knew that they could get jobs as maids.
Pretty much that’s what you were gonna get, working in a maid or as a maid or a factory.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Um, and they chose that. Why? Because as maids, they were sexually vulnerable to assault. [00:53:00] But as sex workers, they were the ones who were made a choice about how and when to have sex. Not that they were- Yeah … immune to assault, right?
But that it wasn’t necessarily equivalent to assault like being a, a domestic servant was. Yeah. From slavery forward, it was always the most vulnerable, dangerous position to be in.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: Who’s gonna believe you? How are you gonna go ask for help? And, you know, what if you lose your job? This impossible situation.
So-
Daisy: Yeah …
Dr. Mireille: if Black women chose sex work over legitimate jobs, right? They’ve always been making these choices, was my argument. This is not new to the ’90s or 2000s in late capital.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: This- The
Daisy: oldest profession for a reason.
Dr. Mireille: Exactly. It’s the oldest profession, and we can go back and we could look at, you know, um, there’s wonderful work on African sex workers, particularly South Africa, Kenya.
Mm. Um, and places like Nigeria and Ghana, some really great work. And of course, organiz- organizing by Black sex worker groups, queer, feminist. [00:54:00] Um, I’ve met a lot of those folks. They’re doing incredible work, and they go back and talk about, you know, from colonialism forward, you know- Yeah … how, uh, sex work became a, a mode of survival under those conditions.
And the ways in which Black labor changed. So you had, for example, many Black people sent to mines for gold, for gems, right? Like Elon Musk’s- Mm … father had an emerald gem. That’s what he knows- Yeah … about Black people, is that they worked themselves to death digging emeralds for his father.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: But, um, those were types of places where it’s all men.
And in those spaces, they formed queer relationships with each other because of- Mm … apart from wives and partners. But also there were town women, just like in the, in the, the great Wild West. Every town, the first thing in the town was the saloon and the brothel, then the bank. Then, you know, all of the Westerns, the women there on the frontier are from the whorehouses, right?
[00:55:00] And then they become wives and some others come in. But it’s everywhere that we’ve had an, uh, an American base abroad, there was a sex industry around it. So it, it does connect to the history of capital and colonial imperialism, of course- … and prior to that. And you know, we can go back even earlier.
But I think that, uh, it really does a disservice when we act like people don’t have a choice, that they didn’t enter the space you know- From their own motivations. Yes, there’s always been trafficking. Yes, there’s always been abuse. But this– they’re not radically equivalent. They’re quite different things.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And this is what I’ve learned from sex worker rights activists, people like Akynos who runs the Black Sex Worker Collective the BIPOC- Yeah … Collective, which, you know, you’ve been part of. Yeah. And Cinnamon Love and- Yes … Jasmine and King Noir and everybody’s involved th- [00:56:00] doing this work, you know, is that oh, no, like, we’ve always had a lot to say about the conditions, about how we’re treated, Mm-hmm
even without formal organizations. There have been even microcosmic ways from how people dress themselves in glamour and beauty- … to challenge the view of, the film. So in the book, Returning to Money, Sex, and Fame, I broke down money. I broke down sex in terms of talking about this historical sexual violence and exploitation about Black women and the spaces that Black women were able to recover or kind of design a sexual culture for themselves, whether it is Josephine Baker or, people like that, um, and others who, you know, Azizi Johari, who was a Playboy model and also the girlfriend of Sammy Davis Jr., or Betty Davis, a, like, amazing music- musician, you know.
Daisy: Love betty Davis.
Dr. Mireille: Like, there’s so much. There’s so much-
Daisy: Yes …
Dr. Mireille: Black culture like that, right? And, um, [00:57:00] and then the fame part, it was really trying to take seriously this desire to be visible and seen in a way that you’ve designed, right?
And- Mm-hmm … you have access and mobility. Uh, everyone’s trying to become an influencer and make it viral online and everything- Yeah … for the same reason. Like, “If they see me, I hope they’ll like me, and then they’ll know me, and then I’ll have an opportunity,” right? Yeah. “Maybe I can get a show and, uh, hit it big or something like this.”
And unfortunately, the stigma on, uh, sex work and porn really does extend to everyone except Kim Kardashian.
Daisy: Yeah.
Oh, man …
Dr. Mireille: you know, the Baywatch babes. Like, but they were kind of dragged when that sex came out. But she also made millions off of her s- sex tape that was supposedly released without her knowledge, but was somehow in high definition Like, so you know, as long as she pretended that she wasn’t a sex worker and that was like really her boyfriend and really against her wishes, she could profit from it.
[00:58:00] But-
Daisy: Apparently she di- supposedly she didn’t make anything from it.
Dr. Mireille: Oh, no. Supposedly. It was like $25 million. That’s what
I-
Daisy: Somebody made something from it, but supposedly- Somebody made something … she personally didn’t make anything from it.
Dr. Mireille: But you know, Kris Jenner is not gonna not get paid when- Yeah
pimping her daughters out. That’s her MO, is pimp-
Yeah,
Daisy: that’s a whole other story.
Dr. Mireille: Blond grandbabies, pimping the dau- you know, pimp them too. So yeah, no, they were, they were making
money.
Yeah. What I heard was different, but you know. But it did, it did, um, create a kind of, uh, uh, mystique around her.
Mm. And particularly the fact that she was with Black men and that she was kind of almost, Blackened. Get to, getting to be this mulatta figure who then steps in to, to model in the same pose as Grace Jones with David LaChapelle, that where she has the champagne glass off her, her ass.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: How dare you? You are no Grace Jones, bitch. That’s
Daisy: not even close.
Dr. Mireille: And then, [00:59:00] and then where she, where she ruined Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Met Gala or whatever that was. She-
Daisy: Ugh …
Dr. Mireille: tore the seams. I mean-
Daisy: Ugh …
Dr. Mireille: it was it, it’s priceless, irreplaceable, and no, you’re not Marilyn Monroe. She was actually a genius and a producer and cut off before her time, like Mae West, you know?
Yeah. Very powerful women in the industry, not just bimbos or sex objects. So long story short, all about agency. Nobody wanted to attend to it. It was something that I demanded, and now I feel like it’s much more of an easier conversation to talk about the agency of people who are multiply marginalized and kind of assume that people have, some sort of agency and embodiment.
And I developed this theory around erotic sovereignty precisely because I learned that Black women, whether they were tr- able to achieve it or not in pornography, always desire to cultivate that for themselves. And it’s not always achievable [01:00:00] under these conditions, but it’s something that they had set out for themselves to have- Mm-hmm
obtain, and that they were using through strategically and tactically using the sex industry for their own interests, for their own survival, for their own thrivance, and for their own pleasure sometimes too.
Yeah.
Daisy: So if our listeners are to take away one thing from all of your research and all of your work and all of the things that you’ve written, what would you want that one thing to be?
Dr. Mireille: Wow. Not to stigmatize sex workers. Like really don’t judge. Learn. You can learn so much about how women can take their power back actually. Just because something is seen to be for the male view doesn’t mean that it’s not for women to view or not a space that we can’t cultivate very [01:01:00] challenging, politically subversive or queer texts.
That there’s not limits even in things that seem quite, I guess offensive or degrading that- Yeah … somebody isn’t doing something that’s really politically important in the moment.
Yeah.
You know? And, um, you have to, uh, you know, many people are not trained to be critical media viewers.
Mm-hmm.
They’re used to absorbing and taking things at face value, and there’s, like, a very simplified way of absorbing media these days in these very short-
Yeah …
kind of things, and not really interrogating it before you move on. And that’s unfortunate because we really need to have a much more, uh, slower, careful time to absorb and think about these things, and, uh-
Daisy: Yeah
Dr. Mireille: and also to t- to think about what you can learn and think about yourself. And I just encourage people to Read [01:02:00] history before you make judgments. Always think about how are the people most in involved? Are they, are their voices included? You know? Yeah. Are there, you know, are they in there or are they just being talked about?
Daisy: Yeah. ‘
Dr. Mireille: Cause I get requests for interviews all the time about sex work stuff, and I’m like, “Okay, so which sex workers have you talked to?” Like, you just talk to me.
Daisy: Yep.
Dr. Mireille: But like you just want me to speak for them because you don’t think that they have a voice or anything to say? Like, you need me to interpret them?
But I’m not saying it as, as good as Daisy Ducati or Cinnamon Love can say it, right? Like, they’re the ones who are, like, really eloquent and, um, about their own lives. And so yes, New York Times, like, go to the source, you know?
Yeah.
So that’s, I think, uh, especially for journalists out there and people doing this work, you know, go to the source.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: And, and, and- Yeah,
Daisy: actually listen to us.
Dr. Mireille: Actually listen, and stop ending the article on some, like, very disempowering [01:03:00] conservative note, it’s just ugh. Yeah. It drives me nuts, so. Yeah, that’s what I would say. That’s what I would end on is stay curious, stay open and also take risks and be sexually radical and, you know-
Daisy: Yes
Dr. Mireille: don’t let this conservative culture, this abusive, abrasive, toxic, masculine you know, manosphere culture rob you of a sexual life. Mm-hmm. I could go on about this, but I think there’s so much fear in people about, you know, maintaining respectability and how they’d be seen, and, “I don’t wanna be seen as one of those people,” and oh my God, right?
But-
Yeah … at
the same time, they’re all mocking and performing and acting like, Black drag queens or ballroom women. You know what I mean? Like, they’re all like-
Daisy: Yes …
Dr. Mireille: “Yes,” da, da, da. But it’s all performant. If you actually listen to the original source, they have a lot to say about sex, pleasure, staying [01:04:00] safe, about losing friends to HIV/AIDS and learning the hard way about how to take care of the community and each other.
Mm-hmm.
And
how that’s still an ongoing cri- crisis, right? Like-
Daisy: Yeah
Dr. Mireille: It’s deeper than y’all, and you need to educate in every way, from safe sex- Mm-hmm … to how to have orgasms, how to give orgasms you know? Yeah. Um, what is sexual history? Let’s unpack the taboos and think about, um, what’s productive and exciting and what inspires you, and where do we want the future to go?
Do we want this to be a sexually conservative future that the Project 2025 has in mind, where all the books are burned or, or- Yeah … buried, taken off the shelves. There’s no books to read about queer identity or sexual health in any libraries in the entire, like, South and Midwest of the country and,
Daisy: um- And not talking about it isn’t gonna make us all go away.
Dr. Mireille: Not gonna… No. And having abstinence-only sex education [01:05:00] does not actually have any positive outcomes at all.
Daisy: Yeah.
Dr. Mireille: You know? So, um, actually it’s the reverse of- Yeah … abstinence-only education. So, um, I have an intruder in my office- … that’s, uh, a child of mine.
But I would say this has been such a pleasure. I love it. I hope that, uh, we can do it again sometime.
Daisy: Thank you so much. Where can our listeners find you online?
Dr. Mireille: Oh, yeah. I’m Dr. Mireille, my handle on all the things. And, um, my website is Mireille Miller-Young. You can find me at UCSB’s website. And watch out because I’m starting a channel, Dr.
Mireille- Yay … TV very soon, and podcast, and I’ll be talking about all the sexy things as well as history, politics, and, uh, maybe a little wild, weird stuff, too.
Daisy: Yay. I can’t wait.
Dr. Mireille: But thank you, Daisy. This is so fun. Thank you.
Daisy: Thank you [01:06:00] so much. Yay. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today.
And please remember to like, subscribe, and rate our podcast. We’ll catch you next time on YAS Podcast.
YAS Podcast began as Yes, A Stripper Podcast with original hosts AM Davies, Onyx Sachi, GiGi Holliday, and Daisy Ducati. Visit yaspodcast.com to learn about our hosts, our story, and comb through our archives of transcripts. You’ll also find episodes as far back as 2020. That’s yaspodcast.com. YAS Podcast is a part of YAS Network, a collection of podcasts created through YAS Work.