Monday, January 29, 2007

The Pink Ghetto: Welcome to NSFW


filed under: Web Sex Index, The Pink Ghetto by Lux Nightmare | 11 Comments

At one of my offices (I have several), I cannot access Sexerati.

If I attempt to go to this site, I am presented with a blank white page that informs me that this site has been blocked for being “Adult/Sexually Explicit.”

The same filtering software blocks me from viewing a bunch of sex education sites: a vaguely inconvenient/ironic situation, given that I work as a sex educator.

When you work in sex – as a sex blogger, a sex educator, a pornographer, whatever – and you’re trying to promote both yourself and your work, you are pretty much guaranteed to come up against some very hard walls.

Ask your friends to subscribe to your RSS feed: they can’t have the word “sex” on their work computer. Ask your blogger friends to promote your project: they can’t, it’d fuck with the vibe they’re going for. Try to get advertisers, try to promote your work, try to sell things using Paypal:

You have now entered the Pink Ghetto.

I’ve been using the Internet to talk about sex, in one form or another, since I was eighteen: basically, since it was legal to do so. Most of my work online has been firmly confined in the Pink Ghetto: it’s the kind of stuff I can’t show to certain types of people, the kind of stuff that people erase from their browser history.

Even when it’s not porn, it’s sex: and sex alone is enough to earn the label NSFW. Sex, even academic sex, is something we can’t always discuss in polite company. Trying to build your life, your career, around a discussion of sex means accepting that you will always have a fringe identity. That no matter how academic, how smart, how clean you keep it, you will always be on the edges of polite society. You will always be in the Pink Ghetto, and you will never be able to escape it.

This piece is the first in a series exploring the nature of discussing sex on the web. Check back next week for more.

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