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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: No Place Else To Go But Slut

filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Melissa Gira

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

When thinking sex online, porn operates as the great dividing line. As those who work sex online, that’s the frame we’re issued — are you porn, or not porn? Explicit, or non-explicit? Adult, or “family friendly”? Safe for work, or…? Who’s work, really? What if writing, blogging, and thinking sex is your work?

Porn — making it, reviewing it, theorizing in best sellers about it — is only just one way to make a living thinking sex, yet porn is still the culture’s point of reference for sex. This framing of sex online as being either porn or not-porn doesn’t just come to us by way of the culture alone. Rather, it is enforced by the structure of our publishing and media industries, that themselves are, in turn, shaped by the culture’s attitudes towards sex. Anyone contributing to the sex culture by reflecting on, educating about, or otherwise talking sex is subject to answering for their work’s ability to arouse — and if it does arouse, how much can it still educate? Being smart about sex and being a sexual smartypants are still viewed as mutually exclusive positions, whether we’re talking sex academia, sex in publishing, or the sex entertainment industry.

What to do for those of us contributing to the sex culture with our words and pictures, no matter how naked we are or aren’t in them? Do we limit our work to abstraction and theory, talking only in the vague and general “you” of the culture as a way not only to seem more credible, but to shield ourselves from being viewed as sluts? Who would care about these things, after all, but sluts? Who would want to make a living from engaging the culture-at-large around sexuality? What kind of person can know so much about human sexuality and can still put a sentence together about it? Just as some people harbor suspicions about “the sex people” as their own form of defense and distancing, so that they don’t have to deal with the possibility of sex being just part of being, so, too, are us “sex people” asked to make apologies for our work if we want to “be accepted.”

So, in this context, I could say I’m only doing this — this sex thing on the Internet — to get somewhere else in my career, as a stepping stone to some supposedly elevated ground as real writer, a real journalist, a real contributor to society. Sex is a commodity, that’s for sure, but it’s only really socially acceptable to traffic in temporarily. Where once upon a time, the story of sex for women was from virgin to whore, in the story of the business of sex writing, there’s the chance for all us soiled doves to reclaim our purity by renouncing sex, relegating sex to “that crazy thing” we wrote about to get our start, revising not just our resumes but our passions.

What if sex is where you want to go, not just your rent as you get there? (Hey, it’s been my rent, too, Not knocking that for a millisecond.) What if sex is your work, not limited to prostitution or porn or what we think of as sex work, but as your medium? What is so less noble about thinking sex rather than money, rather than politics, religion, or art? Sex being so fully embedded in the human experience, I want to put out there that there really is no way to engage the culture on “what really matters” without looking at sexuality.

Producing sexual media, theorizing and studying sex, and educating about sex are not some marginal activity, or at least, they should be thought of as such no longer. For us working sex, refusing to be ghettoized for our labors and loves doesn’t mean “rising up” from the gutter, but resisting the idea that sex is in some gutter at all.

(photo: pinkmoose, via Flickr)

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