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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

(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.

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