Thursday, October 11, 2007

Bubble Hotties: “Let’s Join a Social Network Built Just For Two”


filed under: Bubble Hotties, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Everybody’s former internet-boyfriend ze frank, who was there for us every day until not too long ago, wakes us up this morning with this self-portrait of a love song…

“and omg i would luv that picture of you
taking a picture of you
holding the camera for me
in the bathroom mirror…”

I’m not the only one reminded of ze’s fellow New York bubble hotties?

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Web Sex Index: “Where… (swell in the throat) The Smarts Are…!”


filed under: Do It for Science, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

A tidy roundup of where to find sex smart rippling the web right now:

Belladonna discloses that she’s got herpes and is retiring from porn with an announcement on her MySpace, handily deconstructed by the smartypants commenters at Jezebel.

Pandagon takes on Audacia Ray’s Naked on the Internet, in a review that starts (and in what’s become nearly obligatory to say of any sex worker’s book, sadly) “I’m usually not one to read the latest in the never-ending series of books all best described as ‘I Was A Sex Worker Despite The Fact That I’m An Educated, Middle Class White Woman’…”, sports comments come alive! with shredding of the “male gaze” and why women dig queer porn.

Lastly, be a dear, and take Susie Bright’s timely ‘Bathroom Sex’ survey, or, for the bonus win, the International Rectal Microbicide Working Group’s survey of what lube you use for anal sex.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Bubble Hotties: There’s GIRLS Outside the Bubble!


filed under: Bubble Hotties by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Says Valleywag’s Megan McCarthy:

“…if [Star editor-at-large Julia Allison’s presence at TechCrunch9] is any indication, people outside of our little sphere are starting to pay attention, again, to the exuberance bubbling underneath Silicon Valley. The women who are about to invade the Valley are not the same gold-diggers as before, only out for that stock-option action. This time, they want the stock-option action and free sysadmin time.

Monday, July 30, 2007

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


filed under: Pomoerotic, We Are The Sex Media, Web Sex Index 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)

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Sex, The Internet’s Own Wasteland


filed under: We Are The Sex Media, Web Sex Index 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?

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