Noelle Perdue: The Three Types of Eroticism, The Trevails of a Foot-Fetish Fetishist, Homoflexibility, Looners, Self-Labeling, & More | Riffs & Speculations #1

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} 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 Noelle Perdue.

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.

Noelle also runs the

Porn World with Noelle Perdue

newsletter—so pop over there and subscribe for smart takes on spicy topics! This great piece on how surveillance is shaping our language into “algospeak” is an example of what you’ll get:

"Corn World" / Enforcing Our Own Surveillance

And hey, while you’re pushing buttons, do me a favor and subscribe to Urgent Futures on your favorite platform! Again, that’s: Youtube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify. It does wonders to signal to the algo-overlords that folks like you would enjoy the show. Already subscribed? Send it to a friend!

Fans of the show will recognize Noelle from an earlier episode, which I released in August 2024. It’s a great dive into the more serious aspects of porn in society: how a society’s relationship to porn reveals the biases and forms of repression that society weaponizes, how obscenity law regarding pornography is used to smuggle anti-queer and -trans legislation, how the perceived frivolity of porn allows for creative experimentation that often doesn’t occur in other mediums. I’m biased, of course, but it’s a conversation still very worth listening to (especially given the ongoing attack on civil liberties in the United States under the new administration…).

But you’ll notice that Round 2 is a looser conversation than the first. That’s intentional. I love what the “standard” Urgent Futures episode has become: a deep exploration of a big idea that has implications for our collective futures. But I also found myself wishing I had carved out a space for more freeform conversations, which may include topics that aren’t immediately “urgent.” It’s not all doom and gloom, after all, and I’m lucky to host guests whose skillsets and ideas have real range.

I had been thinking about launching a “sub-series” on Urgent Futures that could be home to such conversations, and then I saw on Noelle’s Instagram story that she was going to briefly be in Los Angeles, so it seemed like the perfect moment to go for it. Thus, what you’re watching/listening to here is the first of an ongoing series of chats that I’m calling “Riffs & Speculations.” Like the content, I’m letting the container stay loose—I’m not exactly sure who or what all will fit into it yet, and I welcome any ideas you might have, so let me know in the comments!

Fortunately for all of us, Noelle does not disappoint. We get into some unexpected places, to say the least. But in addition to topics like her fetish for foot fetishists and her strategic domain purchases, we also dug into her working theory about the three types of eroticism, which I think is genuinely useful for analyzing desire. But to find out what the three types are, you’ll just have to check out the episode, so get to it!

Another episode you might like:

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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.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode on how Western philosophy is destroying life on Earth with legendary ecologist Carl Safina: