Julia Shaw

And I kind of want the reverse of what I want in my day to day life.

And so I can also understand like furries and that sort of completely living as another species of it even is, it's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release and of letting go of social pressure.

It's the being free and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction.

Like you're play acting, but it's touching something deep inside you psychologically.

And so that's where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense.

I mean, this is also why we like fiction, because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else's thoughts in your mind for a while.

And you really get to live it as that for a bit.

So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.

So the research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that they, unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to...

live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell.

And that's true whether it's about your sexuality, so being gay and being unable to live as a gay person, or if that's wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that.

So that can just make you unhappy.

So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of

horrible manifestations of crime i think that is mostly nonsense but it's more that i'm concerned about the mental health consequences for the individual who's unable to explore those sides of themselves and in research on kinks and sexuality it's just about also making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of communities and so that's one of the reasons i ended up writing by i came out in making evil making evil is the uk title evil in the u.s um

I came out because I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.

Yeah, I came out as bisexual, and I came out as bisexual in the book.

And I did it specifically, and I wrote it this way as well, because I was talking about the importance of visibility and how it's through visibility that you realize that the people around you, people you already know and love,

are part of this community that otherwise feels other.

It feels foreign.

It feels abstract.