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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

You Can Tell Now That the Sex Bloggers Have Arrived

filed under: We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 10 Comments

Stigma, said sexuality & kink educator Graydancer, of one of the first sex podcasts, Ropecast, checking in from BlogWorldExpo.

Graydancer’s sum-up details how conversations he struck up with other bloggers were shyly broken off, how one of his models — previously down to be tied up for a performance at a conference party — declined at the last minute over fear of having her startup’s image tarnished, and of how little formal attention sexuality & new media were given on the program. Sad, but common, for sex people doing work outside our niche, whether that’s in or out of web circles. Then at a pajama party as part of the same conference, the owner of Vibrator.com was asked to leave by event organizers for giving out promotional stickers. Was this due their sexual content, or because, as Libby Durfee, co-founder and event producer of BlogWorld said, they were unfairly competing with exhibitors who had paid significant money to be there with their own products? Yes, it’s gross, but that’s the big business of blogging — not unlike the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, also held in Vegas. Now some sex bloggers are questioning Facebook for not permitting a sex blogger to have a profile under her professional, but not legal, name, and yes, I’m asking those questions, too.

But I fear that one of two things is coming to pass, and pass fast:

• The sex bloggers, they have arrived at web celebrity
• The sex bloggers, they have arrived, and my god, some of us are acting just as douchey as the rest of the web celebrities

In other words, important contributions, in the name of improving sexual health, relationships, and pleasure, and of better understanding the sex culture we all play a part in, are being made, and deserve recognition. Unfortunately, just having something smart to say isn’t enough, and so we get some of the behaviors of the so-called New Media Douchebags, that we love to hate but still sometimes indulge in ourselves: starting faux-controversies to get traffic, or worse, to build a brand around. Who wants to be known as “that blogger who had that big problem with [x]”? Some apparently do, and are trading on that sort of flamey attention gladly.

This might be why we can’t have nice things, blogosphere, and sex bloggers are no different. We have no greater claim than anyone else to authenticity or transparency just because it’s about sex with us. We feel just as alien and ostracized — more so, some — from the mainstream and our shoulder chips are significant, and we’re no kinder to one another for it. Though we might fuck really hard, or type really fast about the hard fucking we wish we were doing, just like the rest of the New Media Mafia, we’ll still plunk down a few hundred bucks for a sweatshop labor lanyard with a few dozen logos on it… so we feel like we belong? That we matter? That sex matters?

No schwag, no matter how many planes we had to Twitter we were waiting on to get it, can do that if we lose our inspiration and our wits along the way.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Re[2]: How To Build a Better Sex Blog, and How We’ll Do It, Do It, and Do It Well

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

(img: Your author, right now, writing this, predictably at a wifi cafe in San Francisco. Without makeup, except for my eyebrows, which I fill out with a MAC pencil. I haven’t done anything with my hair yet today, either. Shot quick on my iSight. This is the fourth shot I took. It’s here to say, Your sex blog called. She’s not one to do something like this over the phone, but…)

Longtime dear pal of Sexerati Cory Silverberg blogs further on the challenge raised by Susannah Breslin, to build a better sex blog:

I have a deeply neurotic and fundamentally unhealthy relationship to blogs. I belong to a transitional technological demographic and while I read blogs voraciously for work, every click holds the possibility of sending me reeling into a fit of informational inadequacy. To top it all off, reading, writing and thinking about sex is work so virtually the only fun thing left for me about sex is actually having it.

In what shouldn’t be a bold move, but truly is given the current plateaued state of sex blogging, Cory offers the following challenges, to which Sexerati will now respond, point by pointed point:

• A better sex blog would incite action.
Sexerati has deeply difficult activist leanings. We want the world, but we want it now. We can’t do it alone. To organize a responsive readership, and not just on a grand SexyKos level, around sexual politics and rights requires shared vision, and up to this moment, I don’t believe the sexblogosphere has articulated a sexual politics platform enough folks could get behind. How, then, to change this? And to do it every day? Troubling, too, is that, for the fifteen years I’ve spent navigating sex culture, the only constant when it comes to civics and & perverts is that, contrary to our best p.r., being a sexual outsider does not endow one with some greater sense of duty to the public sexual good. It’s a rare few who put their lives and liberty on the line for others, period, let alone in sex.

• A better sex blog would be less cool.
Pushing the blogger-as-brand has prematurely profesionalized sex blogging. Blogging, and just barely so sex blogging, may be making moguls, but certainly not of us, the writers. What’s sad is that making a living in sex still shakily rests on one’s ability to be at once pundit, expert, and shameless self-promoter. Some, and likely, too many, sex bloggers still believe they have to bank on blogebrity to be meaningful. Working in sex is not always sexy, either — a fact that mass media has yet to accept, but one we are in a unique position to challenge. But will “our people” still love us if we bring on the painful, messy, raw, and awkward, and leave the carefully posed Flickr candids behind?

• A better sex blog would reveal something about the reader and the blogger.
Back to the painful, messy, raw, and awkward again. Professionalism in sex blogging, again, makes confessional a casualty, but then again, enough with the soulbaring already, really. Where is the middle place, where one’s own nakedness as a blogger teases out the same in the reader, without having to splay one’s nethers wide? The irony here is, you can still find my cunt on the web. Find evidence of my sex life of late? Try a little harder. It’s no longer the point. Or my point. We know play-by-play of every fuck can be just as much a performance as a dry and tidy little essay. So now what? I want to seduce again with sex, but this time, I want to seduce stories.

• A better sex blog would be about everything, just like sex.
Or, an opportunity to sound off from on high, “No, the reason you can’t have an orgasm isn’t because you can’t operate your own body or you don’t have the right to own a vibrator. It might be because you work sixty hours a week, or have a partner who only wants to get off himself, or because you’re scared you’ll tell her you love her, or you can’t relax because you couldn’t afford an abortion again, or you don’t get aroused no matter how wet you are if the light in the room is from a television reminding you that America is as fucked as you are not in this moment.” That doesn’t go down well as a how-to, no. Which is even more so why it is time to say…

• A better sex blog would be critical about sex.
Sex is not liberating. Sex is not heaven. Sex is not love. Sex is not commitment. Sex is not pleasure. Sex is not a relationship. Sex is not positive. Sex is not smart. Sex is. it’s our culture that does all the rest of those parlor tricks. Time to shine a light where it belongs, and not up sex’s skirt, but on the whole damn peep show audience: us.

• A better sex blog would be subversive.
So if a better sex blog could redistribute sexual wisdom more democratically, could a better sex blog then also put this trope of sex blogger-as-sexpert out of business? And where does that leave all of us, the people formerly known as the audience?

I’m willing to see.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

[re:] To Build a Better Sex Blog

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

Susannah Breslin (Reverse Cowgirl):

“Something more than one more portal to free porno. Something other than one girl’s Dear Diary of zipless fucks. Something without pseudonymous erotica, bad porn ads, and half-naked self-portraits via cellphones…

Something post-feminist and politically incorrect, unabashed and unashamed, what girls talk about where boys aren’t.”

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

“Slate” Can Be Sexual Too

filed under: We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Sex and more sex: Slate does a special sex issue, which I’m taking with my tea. Start with their Sex Ed 2.0 video, proof positive that sex video online would come to a grinding halt without the Prelinger Archive to sample “hygiene” films from.

What’s completely endearing is the prospect of, like the snip of sex ed d.i.y. video towards the end produced by two young guys for their health class, YouTube (not just YouPorn, as suggested) could be a new site of teens-teaching-teens sex online. So refreshing, compared to the adult ambivalence about whether or not having actual sex is an okay possible outcome of teen sex ed. Love the advice “If you can’t beat the Web, join it!,” but the end note here, that being sexual is a loss of innocence to be avoided, is just slightly less outdated than the 70’s classroom flicks it’s cut next to.