Monday, January 7,

The Future of Sexerati


filed under: Erotic Elite by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Year Three of Sexerati begins now, and I’m taking it elsewhere.

melissa gira - sheets

To pull the sheets back for a moment, Sexerati has produced sex in what we would once have called my future (the present) in forms that still feel novel. The Pink Ghetto has jumped to the printed page, in this year’s volume of Best Sex Writing. The first bit of sex gossip I manhandled from a rising star blogger put us in bed together (and love, which is even filthier). Queen of all glories, though, is having the sex smart writers who inspired me way before day one take notice, and for the encouragement of the internet generation of sex media makers to provoke the whole thing on (Susannah and Viviane and Dacia especially).

In fact, Susannah beat me to a forecast, and did it even better than I could have, and in part using my own words which read:

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.

Though I’m not one for themes all the time, I do get it up for a good, long theoretical wrestle with a question. Which as of today is, “How can I explain how the internet isn’t ruining sex?”

Until we’re bent into the floor, wet with pride and choice words, and this time even a few live shots of the action as it unfolds, I’ll be tackling it hard now and right here.