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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Bubble Hotties: Scheduling Life and Love While Holding a Blackberry

filed under: Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index, Bubble Hotties by Lux Nightmare | Leave a Comment

The bubble — (blogging about) it’s so hot right now. As the bubble (or, hopefully, not-a-bubble) grows, so too, does the collective hotness of the web and its makers. Here Sexerati tracks the ways web development and erotic development complement and complicate one another for those profiting from the web, and for those who fuck them.

I’m a busy person.

Most days I wake up, go to my computer, check my email, write or code or fix something that has broken, go to my real job (where I sometimes do work on other projects, in my downtime or on my lunch break), then go home and do more work.

My “free time” is often devoted to whatever work I can squeeze in. Or going to networking events, or (occasionally) attempting to have a social life.

I’m a busy person, and I’m attracted to busy people. It’s only natural. Unfortunately, busy + busy doesn’t always make for the easiest of scheduling — and it can sometimes get in the way of getting to know someone (even someone you really like).

The whole dot-com revolution, the whole tech age, is built on the back of things like email, cell phones, laptops: things that allow us to do to be in touch anywhere, at any time. Things that heighten our productivity by increasing our availability, by making so many things a wherever, whenever, activity.

And of course, there are many ways in which is this is a boon to a budding relationship. The ability to IM, to text, to cam chat — to be together even when you’re not — can provide a much needed sense of closeness.

But on the other hand, an increasing ability to do work whenever, wherever, leads to an increasing expectation that we’ll be working all the time. The end of “office hours” is partly a freeing thing (we can work whenever we want!) but also a new kind of prison (we have to work all the time!).

I’ve had dates end prematurely because someone’s Blackberry alerted them to a crisis that needed to be addressed right that minute. I’ve had boyfriends pull out their laptops while lying in my bed, because a pager alerted them that a server was having issues. And on the one hand, I love this: love that I get access to people who are this driven, this needed; that these people are willing to give me their time.

But on the other hand, there’s a small part of me that knows that this is how it is, that this is how it will always be: that the price we pay for success in a world of instant, constant access is the sacrifice of some privacy, some time for ourselves, some intimacy.

And I love my techonology: but every step forward necessitates some kind of loss, and sometimes I pine a little for the things we ultimately give up.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals, Old School Edition: LiveJournal and Make Out Club

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

Let’s all go meet up in the year 2000, with “The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals” taking you back to those Web 1.0 halcyon days, in this, the ‘Old School’ Edition…

Site Name: LiveJournal

Ostensible Purpose: One of the very first hosted blogging sites, having opened up in 1999, LJ began as founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s school project, and is now home to over 12 million journals. Surely some of them, if they aren’t your friends, might soon be your Friends.

What It’s Really Used For: The multiple layers of “Friends-Only” blog security, where users can specify exactly which subcliques within cliques can read their journal entries, make LJ a hotbed of sekretkeeping… and ljdrama. Locking down posts also provides the privacy required for bloggers to share their quiz results and cat photos without fear of haters.

Target Demographic: Back in the day? Anyone who wanted “to tell the story of their life, as it happened.”

Who Really Uses It: Remember that girl you met in the women’s room at the fetish party, the one in the handmade corset designed after what she thought a Harry Potter teacher might wear at a fetish party, who gave you her business card that linked to some website with userpics of her that looked like someone unfortunately gave someone a little too much homebrewed mead after the Ren Faire and let them go at the Saran Wrap and Gaussian blur? Yeah.

Good For Meeting People? Searching on Interests might connect you with someone, but who remembers that they put “fraggle rock” and “sassy magazine” in their Interests back when they signed up?

Good For Stalking People? Remember that girl… and her boy-slave, and his longterm partner, and his coven, and their IT consulting startup, and their office ferrets? Sure. All of them belonging to the same LJ communities make catching up on their co-op household gossip/polydrama/favorite 70’s British horror films all the more expedient. (And one of their ferrets keeps a totally mean haiku journal.)

Bottom line: Don’t be surprised if you’re still reading the journals of all of your ex’s on your Friends List six years after you signed up “just to try it out.”

Site Name: make out club

Ostensible Purpose: A true golden oldie, MOC was apparently started by a bunch of indie kids in Cambridge in 2000, and purports to be “an online community for people like you, a place to find old friend and new friends!”…

What It’s Really Used For: …if you can rock a detached pose with your beverage of choice in hand and/or in your obscure, deconstructed band teeshirt.

Target Demographic: Back in college when MOC opened? Anyone who thought putting a photo on a website was too much work, but having a little form to upload it with and a place to aggregate enough potential emo love interest to view it? AWESOME.

Who Really Uses It: Still? *cue crickets, humming New Order*

Good For Meeting People? Back in the day? Good for drunk-searching and drunk-mocking profiles while up too late writing papers. And if you want to actually message that guy who says his favorite thing to do is “drink red wine and dance around the room screaming the lyrics to ‘Teenage Riot’” who can blame you?

Good For Stalking People? See above. Turns out he lives down the hall, who knew?

Bottom line: What I’m supposed to say I love about dating 2.0: it’s so amazing that we have all these tools now to help us build community and really get to know one another on social networking sites by expressing ourselves. What I really want to say, after going back to MOC last night for the first time in years: You know, I don’t really need to know what everybody who’s been given a little white on-screen box to write whatever they want to in has to say.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: Where Everyone Knows (and Doesn’t Know) Your Name

filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

(This is part three in our series, The Pink Ghetto, on writing and working sex on the Internet.)

When you’re trying to promote yourself — both online and off — it helps to develop a recognizable brand. As the Internet has grown, developed, and professionalized, it’s become common to see people making use of it to build a brand identity: and even more common for that brand to be one’s real name.

I’ve always been interested in using the Internet as a tool for building a brand: back when I ran a porn site I created accounts on every social networking site I could find, using the profiles to raise my visibility and promote my projects. I’ve done a great deal to put my name out there, to make my name synonymous with sex education, with smart dialogue about sex, with quality erotica. And I’ve done a pretty good job: in a lot of circles, Lux Nightmare creates an immediate association with all the things I want to stand for.

There’s just one catch.

My name isn’t really my name.

This is the problem of making a career in sex: as much as you want to promote yourself, put your name out there, become a recognizable figure; as much as you want everyone to know your name; there’s a certain fear that one day you’ll need to go “legit,” that one day having your real name easily associated with smut won’t be the best career move.

This is, again, the problem with doing work that lives in the Pink Ghetto.

I’m not ashamed of the work I do, or the work I’ve done: I’m not ashamed to have my image or voice or brand associated with smart work around sex. And I want to say that it’s just a short step away from associating this work with my real name.

But I’m a realist, and I know that putting my real name on work that’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from porn means getting myself blackballed (pinkballed?) from any kind of “legitimate” work. Doing porn under a pseudonym is not an act of shame, it’s an act of self-protection. Being out as someone who has worked in porn, someone who works on the fringe of sex advocacy and education, would ultimately jeopardize my safety, my sanity — not to mention the sex education work that I do out in the real world, under my real name.

It should be noted, of course, that there are people who do work around sex and do use their real names (Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tristan Taormino, and Jamye Waxman immediately spring to mind). But these people are often the exception to the rule: and perhaps, most tellingly, these are often people who started their work as writers, edging into the Pink Ghetto after a professional reputation had already been established.

A few months ago, I was interviewed by Wendy Shalit about my involvement in porn. I told her that I had left the industry, moved on, largely because I couldn’t handle the weight of stigmatized work: couldn’t handle the ghettoized nature of what I was doing. And it’s true, and to a degree it still holds.

I would love to put my real name out there, to unite my “legitimate” work with my stigmatized work and tell the world that I’m proud of it all, that it’s all an important part of my fight for sexual literacy, for sexual knowledge and freedom and education. I would love to take a stand like that. But I can’t. There is too much to lose, too much at stake: and for now, it’s not a battle I’m prepared to fight.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Stephen Colbert vs. Female Chauvinist Pigs

filed under: Strange Bedfellows, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

How, how, how did I miss Ariel Levy on The Colbert Report?

(That’s right — by just getting my teevee from the Internet.)

Remember, kids: the reason that women are losing the war on sex? Because strippers hate our freedom.

(Video from Colbert OnDemand; more: nofactzone.net, ColbertNation)