Politics & Power Quote by Jill Robinson

Robinson’s line skewers American sexuality as a performance problem, not a libido problem. The jab lands because it flips the usual moral panic: we’re not “too sexual,” we’re too rehearsed. “Crazy” isn’t desire spilling over; it’s the frantic energy of people trying to hit their marks without knowing the scene’s emotional logic. In that framing, sex becomes less an experience than a set of camera angles, facial expressions, and scripted crescendos we’ve absorbed from screens.

The key knife-twist is “all our responses are acting.” Robinson isn’t just complaining about pornified culture; she’s diagnosing a deeper emotional illiteracy. If you’re trained to read yourself through images, your body becomes a prop and your feelings become cues. That’s why “We don’t know how to feel” matters more than the sexual content itself: it’s an indictment of a culture that teaches choreography before intimacy, technique before self-knowledge.

“We know how it looked in the movies” names the real authority structure here. Hollywood doesn’t merely entertain; it standardizes a fantasy of what desire should look like from the outside, which is exactly the wrong angle for learning what pleasure, consent, or connection feel like from the inside. The subtext is that Americans are simultaneously liberated and tightly managed: permissive about sex as spectacle, uneasy about sex as honest communication. Robinson’s intent is cultural critique with a writer’s precision, turning “acting” into both metaphor and method: we aren’t having sex so much as staging it.