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Tuesday, February 6, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: More Euphemisms We Don’t Like

filed under: The Pink Ghetto by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

(adorable Technorati graphic, perfect in this out-of-context)

Jamais Cascio of, Open The Future and Worldchanging, suggests in the comments, “for men who work in the sex culture field the damning term isn’t ’slut,’ but ‘pervert.‘”

Elizabeth Wood, of Sex and the Public Square, points to a discussion in the Wordpress user forums, where bloggers whose work is getting tagged “mature” debate the relative meaning(lessness) of the label. Elizabeth: “The illogical effect of being reported as mature is that one’s blog is apparently unlisted from the tag pages that would be surfed by people looking for mature content.”

“The Pink Ghetto” itself is getting around, thanks to Rachel Kramer Bussel, then on to Susan Mernit and Amy Gahran, and today at BlogHer in the Business section, no less. Again, all this is begging the question, and no, we never beg: “Whose work aren’t we safe for, again?”

Thursday, February 1, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: With Stigma Comes Opportunity

filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

(This is part four in our series, The Pink Ghetto, on writing and working sex on the Internet.)

It would be very easy to write piece after piece complaining about the frustration of working from a stigmatized place, to rail against the system that tells us that sex is dirty, that interest in sex is necessarily prurient, that we must hide any and all discussions of sex behind a filter of NSFW.

It would be very easy to do that: it would also be very depressing and relatively pointless. And so, in the fourth installment of the Pink Ghetto, I would like to take a moment to reflect on some of the more positive aspects of operating out of stigmatized territory.

When I was twenty years old, I was a CEO. I was getting interviewed for pieces in respectable national publications, I was being treated as an authority in my chosen field. People respected what I had to say: and even today, even after several years of keeping a low profile, I still get requests for interviews. My opinion, thoughts, and experiences are still valued, still treated as worthwhile.

I got that, I got to this place, because I wasn’t afraid of stepping into the Pink Ghetto: even more so, because I was willing to bring my best efforts, to bring talent and care and charisma, to my Pink Ghetto work. I didn’t shy away from the stigma: I gave it my all. And because I was one of relatively few people willing to do that, I stood out. I gained notoriety. I gained a voice.

I hate the stigma that comes with the work that I do: I’m also fully aware that it is the stigma that makes it so appealing. I go to the places that I go because the aura of the Pink Ghetto frightens away other talented individuals: and in doing so, in being willing to take the risks that I take, I stake out this land as my world, my area, my expertise.

I would love to live in a world where the study of sexuality is viewed on the same level as any other academic discipline, where a healthy attitude towards sexuality is recognized as a fundamental part of a healthy lifestyle. I don’t live in that world, not yet: and so I am happy, eager, to fight for that world, even if it means slipping into the Pink Ghetto. Even if it means taking on the weight, the oppression, the fear of the stigma in order to do it. With stigma comes opportunity: and embracing the stigma of the Pink Ghetto, taking it head on, has given me opportunities, experiences, far beyond any I might have achieved out in the mainstream world.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: Where Everyone Knows (and Doesn’t Know) Your Name

filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

(This is part three in our series, The Pink Ghetto, on writing and working sex on the Internet.)

When you’re trying to promote yourself — both online and off — it helps to develop a recognizable brand. As the Internet has grown, developed, and professionalized, it’s become common to see people making use of it to build a brand identity: and even more common for that brand to be one’s real name.

I’ve always been interested in using the Internet as a tool for building a brand: back when I ran a porn site I created accounts on every social networking site I could find, using the profiles to raise my visibility and promote my projects. I’ve done a great deal to put my name out there, to make my name synonymous with sex education, with smart dialogue about sex, with quality erotica. And I’ve done a pretty good job: in a lot of circles, Lux Nightmare creates an immediate association with all the things I want to stand for.

There’s just one catch.

My name isn’t really my name.

This is the problem of making a career in sex: as much as you want to promote yourself, put your name out there, become a recognizable figure; as much as you want everyone to know your name; there’s a certain fear that one day you’ll need to go “legit,” that one day having your real name easily associated with smut won’t be the best career move.

This is, again, the problem with doing work that lives in the Pink Ghetto.

I’m not ashamed of the work I do, or the work I’ve done: I’m not ashamed to have my image or voice or brand associated with smart work around sex. And I want to say that it’s just a short step away from associating this work with my real name.

But I’m a realist, and I know that putting my real name on work that’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from porn means getting myself blackballed (pinkballed?) from any kind of “legitimate” work. Doing porn under a pseudonym is not an act of shame, it’s an act of self-protection. Being out as someone who has worked in porn, someone who works on the fringe of sex advocacy and education, would ultimately jeopardize my safety, my sanity — not to mention the sex education work that I do out in the real world, under my real name.

It should be noted, of course, that there are people who do work around sex and do use their real names (Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tristan Taormino, and Jamye Waxman immediately spring to mind). But these people are often the exception to the rule: and perhaps, most tellingly, these are often people who started their work as writers, edging into the Pink Ghetto after a professional reputation had already been established.

A few months ago, I was interviewed by Wendy Shalit about my involvement in porn. I told her that I had left the industry, moved on, largely because I couldn’t handle the weight of stigmatized work: couldn’t handle the ghettoized nature of what I was doing. And it’s true, and to a degree it still holds.

I would love to put my real name out there, to unite my “legitimate” work with my stigmatized work and tell the world that I’m proud of it all, that it’s all an important part of my fight for sexual literacy, for sexual knowledge and freedom and education. I would love to take a stand like that. But I can’t. There is too much to lose, too much at stake: and for now, it’s not a battle I’m prepared to fight.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: No Place Else To Go But Slut

filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Melissa Gira | 5 Comments

(This is part two in our series, The Pink Ghetto, on writing and working sex on the Internet.)

When thinking sex online, porn operates as the great dividing line. As those who work sex online, that’s the frame we’re issued — are you porn, or not porn? Explicit, or non-explicit? Adult, or “family friendly”? Safe for work, or…? Who’s work, really? What if writing, blogging, and thinking sex is your work?

Porn — making it, reviewing it, theorizing in best sellers about it — is only just one way to make a living thinking sex, yet porn is still the culture’s point of reference for sex. This framing of sex online as being either porn or not-porn doesn’t just come to us by way of the culture alone. Rather, it is enforced by the structure of our publishing and media industries, that themselves are, in turn, shaped by the culture’s attitudes towards sex. Anyone contributing to the sex culture by reflecting on, educating about, or otherwise talking sex is subject to answering for their work’s ability to arouse — and if it does arouse, how much can it still educate? Being smart about sex and being a sexual smartypants are still viewed as mutually exclusive positions, whether we’re talking sex academia, sex in publishing, or the sex entertainment industry.

What to do for those of us contributing to the sex culture with our words and pictures, no matter how naked we are or aren’t in them? Do we limit our work to abstraction and theory, talking only in the vague and general “you” of the culture as a way not only to seem more credible, but to shield ourselves from being viewed as sluts? Who would care about these things, after all, but sluts? Who would want to make a living from engaging the culture-at-large around sexuality? What kind of person can know so much about human sexuality and can still put a sentence together about it? Just as some people harbor suspicions about “the sex people” as their own form of defense and distancing, so that they don’t have to deal with the possibility of sex being just part of being, so, too, are us “sex people” asked to make apologies for our work if we want to “be accepted.”

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.

(photo: pinkmoose, via Flickr)