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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Speaking & Teaching Sex Outside the Bubble

filed under: State of Sex Ed, We Are The Sex Media, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 5 Comments

The challenge with the democratization of media-making has been just that: you know, democratization, getting voices and stories from outside the social media saturated echo chamber (San Francisco, New York, hello) out into the Great World Beyond. Which might be why finding a show like The Midwest Teen Sex Show is still shocking:

Shocking?

Because, the phrase “teen sex” online still conjures up exploitative badness, even among the most sex-positive minded, and is here used in an actually context-appropriate fashion.

Because the opening (cute girl scantily clad) apes so many cliches of online video, and in so doing, shreds them, at the same time as resisting a desexualization of the discussion of sex — a discussion of sex amongst teens, no less, which is so often over-sanitized to the point of nonsense.

Because the sense of humor throughout is sharp, and real, and not from a place of pained hipster irony, or calculated self-mockery, or some bizarre disdain for sex itself.

(It happens.)

Because being able to laugh at sex from a smart place may be one of the only things keeping us sane these days.

And because giving girls a chance to write and make media? About sex? That doesn’t shame them? Oh my god, Nikol, adopt me ex post facto, please.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Sex 2.-OH NOES!!1!!!

filed under: Web Sex Index, We Are The Sex Media, Pomoerotic by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Nobody’s famous!, is really all the headline ought to have read in the Times (UK)’s latest technology bit on internet celebrity. Of course, we know that the virtue in having total, always-on infamy available to everyone (oh, except those pesky people still living without highspeed web access or GPRS, or cameras, or computers, how dare they) is that if everyone’s famous, aren’t we all liberated by the flattening effect that nobody is?

Oh, that, and when there’s no bogeyman left to trot out, sex still brings the terror, old school style:

In Web 1.0, human nature expressed itself primarily through lust and greed. Everybody was trying – and failing – to find new ways of making money, and delivering pornography was the main purpose of the web. Both are still present in Web 2.0, but they have changed. Making money, through online gambling and advertising focused on individual users, for example, exploits the new levels of interactivity. Pornography is now delivered with streaming video and, frequently, high levels of interactivity. In addition, there are now porn social-networking sites. You can post your home-made porn on one site and join in the fun as a voyeur on another. And there are endless sites offering the full 2.0 sex experience.

Immaturity break: omg, wrong, wrong, wrong!

First, fuck web 1.0, remember 1994? If you want titty, you’re on Usenet, plain and simple. Want “interactive” sex? Learn to spell, pervert, and hang in the hottub at LambdaMoo. Web 1.0 just organized this activity, with the addition of hyperlinking directories of some relatively decontextualized nudie photos, behind payment screens — oh, and removed most of the flesh and blood “hey, this could be a real girl!” thrill from much of online sex. But what also came forth, between the birth of the “click-here” age verification and the ashes of VISA deigning to accept most porn dollars?

Well:

Two, there has always been an online porn community. Porn communities, in the form of blogs, forums, and personal profiles, were the glue that held together the earliest alt.porn sites (no, not the big pink & black kid on the block). Thanks in no small part, I say, to porn, an internet generation came up around the notion that content was one thing, but conversation (I know, I know, that word!) was another. We may not all have wanted to talk to one another, but we did want to more efficiently find what we liked, and so that leads to “users” unveiling desire to one another through the safety of a screen in an actually new way. It was this community & conversation that lent the context to online sex that makes it hot, makes it (dare I say) real, and makes it easy to sell.

It’s not sex, but the context of sex, that’s bought and sold online. (A few varieties of commercial sex notwithstanding.) And really, I like to think there may have never been a Facebook were it not for nakkidnerds (unfortunate misspelling aside).

Oh, three! Unless you’re still marveling at your shiny new Zip disc, streaming porn probably no longer bears the frisson of La Nouvelle.

Lastly, the “full 2.0 experience”? Sir, you wouldn’t know what that was like, even if every A-list blogger that ended up in your bed turned from your dick in the pale light of morning to their Blackberry, grabbed the latest sycophantic proclamations of THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET off of Twitter, and beat you about the balls with the baby blue screen.

Because for that sir, there’s a $5000 conference entrance fee, plus $1000 gratuity to the web-enabled domme of our sponsor’s choice.

(thx, and via, violet blue)

Friday, July 13, 2007

A Little Bit 21st Century Slut, A Little Bit Cloistered Girl

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

Three quick links for the weekend, dears, all care of the National Sexuality Resource Center:

• Look Who’s Googling, on managing online identity in the New Dating Age. I’m sure we can build even more so on the privacy suggestions offered (i.e., avoid posting your last name, email address, phone number, or where you work).

• Queer Connections Before Craigslist: How gay men got in touch pre-Internet times, which delivers some beautiful retro gay culture kitsch:

In 1946 Bois Burke, a resident of Berkeley, California, placed a personal advertisement in a new magazine called The Hobby Directory… But he was hoping to do more than initiate the sort of platonic exchange that was the norm for pen-pal clubs and correspondence societies of his day. Instead, Burke and the other members of The Hobby Directory, which included an overabundance of “florists,” “hair stylists,” and “male nurses,” desired a decidedly queer sort of contact: They wished to connect with others they perceived to be like themselves but whom they had difficulty locating in the regular passage of their everyday lives.

• Nightline on “Hooking Up,” with such high-larious moments as “So, what does ‘hit it and quit it’ mean?” — but watch it for San Francisco State University professor Deb Tolman smartly countering the whole Hooking Up phenom — no, getting educated & jobs did not make women total whores. And so what if it did?

Now go out there, flirt & hook up, get a little retro gay, resist the urge to Google each other, and have a great weekend.

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?