Margaret Cho spoke with BuzzFeed’s Ariane Lange about her new show on TLC, "All About Sex." A few interesting tidbits:
On the AIDS crisis of the 1980s:
You said you learned a lot about sex as a young person from gay men, whom you grew up around in San Francisco. Can you speak about that?
MC: When AIDS came in, there was a lot of fear around sexuality, so you had a whole generation of people learning to have sex without bodily fluids. This is when BDSM [really took hold], where you had sexuality that did not have the same look or trappings of genital sex, which, at the time, after AIDS, was a very scary thing to do. I witnessed a variety of different kinds of sexuality through growing up within the gay community, and then surviving the AIDS crisis.
On the importance of women talking about sex:
Is there a radicalism to joking about enjoying sex as a woman? I was thinking about Joan Rivers, who I love, and I know you love, but one of her recurring jokes throughout her career — two of her recurring jokes — was that she was ugly and also that she didn’t like sex. That’s a joke that you don’t really make, and not something that you put out there.
MC: Yeah, that’s almost like a different generation. Joan’s joke about avoiding sex, or just doing it because you have to, to please your husband… she always had that joke about how she’d be reading a magazine at the same time or something. It was her way of trying to get control over the situation by ignoring the man trying to have sex with her. I always thought what she did was funny, but that’s a definite generational joke. I wouldn’t make the same joke. I think you should really enjoy the sex you have. If you have sex, it should be for you, not for the other person. That joke is assuming that sex is always in service to men, which I think I wanna flip that, and make it all about the woman. Or me.