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Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Sex, The Internet’s Own Wasteland

filed under: Web Sex Index, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
- T. S. Eliot

I don’t mean to lay the blame at your feet, internet, but I am. How abysmal, how easy. In the morning there are sex bloggers on both America’s coasts (and in the middle, too, but there are fewer, or at least, fewer who say so) searching you for signs of intelligence, and just coming up pale and empty. For fuck’s sake, Technorati’s WTF? Sex has already been taken over with SEO rubbish, the fate of any social search tool that sex is allowed to traffic in (Yahoo killed theirs, and what of you, Mahalo?). Want to cry into your tea with less of a community of users driving your tears? Just customize your Google homepage to sex story feeds (here, I’m not territorial, are a few of mine: “sex study,” “sex research,” “sex science”) and read, weep, repeat. SEX NEWS IS BAD NEWS. Sex news tracked on the Web even more so. Sex news tracked by an untrained public? Just hand me my Hitachi and the handcrank generator, or something with enough batteries to get me off until the future arrives for real, please.

So what, then, would break through the internet wasteland of sex, where scandal passes for conversation and teaching people how to have an orgasm (so long as we don’t track your IP or tell your blogroll) and not get HIV is still seen as the apex of sex education? These are all still vital acts, yes, but they are not the whole picture of sex, not hardly. In fact, the more we focus on the endgame — coming, not dying — we lose the big picture, of why this information might be hard to come by in the first place.

What sex media would make a dent in this? Can sex media make a dent? Sex blogging at first seemed the answer: of course, people have been blogging sex since before blogging was blogging, and when blogging broke into genres — prematurely, I say, but of course, it brought advertisers with it — sex blogging itself went a bit stale. Is it good for the state of sex to just fill the web with more and more and more stories of all the ways we could, do, would fuck? Is it good for the state of sex to just say more — or ought we consider how to speak more smartly of sex?

Blogging is just a platform, blogging could be what we like, and FTW, Sexerati is not going to get all Andrew Keen on sex & the web, but what if it did? What if we dosed the sex web with a bit more erati – the gleeful elitism of sex that we supposedly dare not go there with? Sex is to be celebrated, sure, and people everywhere need better sex education, sex skill-building, sex comfort even.

But what else? Sex culture. Sex lit. Sex analysis. Sex theory. Sex happenings. Sex community.

Sex smarts, in other words, that fill the needs of not just the individual, but the sexual body politic. Sex that serves a civic duty, yes!

Sex that can be spoken from the rooftops and straight on through them, not just confined within a textfield.

There’s no argument that the internet has given rise to new sexual speech. Foucault, Sedgwick, Rubin, all would rejoice a little. Now, though, surrounded by new online sex acts each day, is it not time to apply a bit of a critical eye to how sexuality is produced by the internet? How we play a part in the production of sex in not just our reading, linking, and tagging, but in what we don’t even think to look for?

Monday, June 4, 2007

The Morning After: Love 2.0, Classy Smutty Hotels, and Do It For Science

filed under: The Morning After by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Quick hits that hit what we weren’t hitting when we were hitting the sheets:

• • Love 2.0: the video: “I’m running love 2.0 for you, it’s still in beta but it’s running pretty smooth.” (Valleywag)
• • San Diego’s Ivy Hotel pushes jet sex with utter capitalist shamelessness: “It’s an adult playground, but it’s not cheap.” See also: mandatory sociologist trotted out to tell us how this all is just more evidence of our culture’s pornification: “there’s more people on the Internet now!” Because no one fucked in a hotel when it was just ARPAnet. (LA Times)
• • Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler radiant on Coney Island: nothing lasts forever. (365 Portraits)
• • Our hero Laura Kipnis on the eloquence of pornography: “Pornography should interest us, because it’s intensely and relentlessly about us. It involves the roots of our culture and the deepest corners of the self. It’s not just friction and naked bodies: pornography has eloquence. It has meaning, it has ideas. It even has redeeming ideas. So why all the distress?” (Reverse Cowgirl)
• • The University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology is seeking participants for a study, “Sexual Behaviour: The Roles of Sexual Arousal Regulation and Sexual Drive.” Give up an hour for science; lab coat optional (may skew sample, even). (Viviane’s Sex Carnival)

Monday, June 4, 2007

The Big (Corrupt) Business of Abstinence-Only Education

filed under: Do It for Science, Strange Bedfellows, State of Sex Ed by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Not only is abstinence-only sex “education” (where’s the education, exactly?) without evidence in reducing STI’s and unwanted pregnancies, now its crooked money trail is starting to unravel, as well.

Out in this week’s Nation, The Abstinence Gluttons tracks the neoconservative anti-abortion, anti-comprehensive sex education agenda, and reveals it for the cashgrab that it is. Abstinence-only “education” is simply another business for the Bush administration, a way to funnel funding into long-time campaign contributors pockets and out of programs that are proven to increase sexual health.

There’s simply no way to combat the seemingly anti-sex, Christian Fundamentalist motivations of abstinence-only programs on the grounds of the public health imperative to promote positive sexuality alone. Really what we need is to reframe the excessive waste of money and the total abdication of civic duty as the coming of the Halliburtons of sex. This is sex war profiteering, and like any other, the casualties are mounting.