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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Blue Monday: If Sex Educators Could Make a Living Wage, Would We Sue to Protect Our Brand?

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

In the “Power, Corruption, and Lies” Department: on Monday, October 22, San Francisco based sex educator & author Violet Blue filed suit against porn star Violet Blue, seeking damages for violation of the the trademark “Violet Blue”, filed in March 2007, and to block the porn star from doing business as Violet Blue Inc.

As reported at Wired’s “Threat Level” blog, Violet Blue TM alleges unfair business practices over Violet Blue Inc.’s adoption of her name and her “distinctive, black Bettie Page-style bangs.” How many women involved in sex & sexuality education sport these bangs is beside the point, but really. There are quite a few. What’s at stake for Violet Blue TM is brand dilution; that is, as she wrote in 2006, that journalists would confuse the two Violet Blues, or that Violet Blue Inc.’s brand would be conflated with Violet Blue TM.

Is it damaging that a porn star chose the name of someone else working in sex as her stage name? Or is what’s really telling about the case that, unlike supermodels and actresses whose names are often repurposed in smut, an indie sex writer & educator’s likeliest route of recourse is to file a lawsuit seeking financial renumeration? It’s clear that the press have been confused by the multiple Violet’s in porn question, but then, the press are more or less a mess when it comes to sex at all.

But if the ability of the press to discern the reality of the sex culture, and who is who within it, when such information is so easily searchable, is our measure of how valuable our brand is, then a lot of us sex educators and writers are pretty fucked. How often do they get basic sexual health information wrong? How many times have we had to pitch in substantial research ourselves? (And don’t get me started on the time I was told in an interview that I invented sex work.)

Are our brands so easily watered down, so vulnerable to being tarnished? Is our work of so little value to the mass culture that we have to defend it in court? The total fail here lies not with Violet Blue Inc. being stubborn and/or clueless, or with the media who can’t figure out the difference between a porn star and a porn reviewer, but with the brokenness (and brokeness) in being an independent sex educator, how difficult it is for us to support one another, and how delicate a career built on sex really still is.

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.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Lazysexweb: Spankwire, The Vimeo of Porn

filed under: Lazysexweb by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

An actually social social porn site? With user comments that closely resemble full-on sentences? Spankwire starts with the YouPorn/PornoTube model (upload, tag, rate smut) but somehow ended up with users smarter, sweeter, and more committed to actually providing guidance to the good stuff.

Like this helpful lad:

Or this reminder:

this is the kind of video you find mildly arousing when ur wanking. but as soon as you cum, you’re like “wtf did i just wank to!?”.

Or this social commentary:

^^It’s because of the connotations and connections the typical person has with Japanese people, as much I HATE to admit it. Although this is made to be a fantasy, I am still angered that people are out there that think that about the Japanese women. Makes me damn sick to even think about it, and that someone would think of Asians as sexual FREAKS. And the only time a schoolgirl outfit is worn that way is when girls wants everyone to have a good look at their goods.

All that said, though, the ending was hilarious.

Such caring users, in sharp contrast to what passes for “community” on other porn video sharing sites, can only call to mind their counterpart in the world of supposedly non-porn video community.

Or: Spankwire : YouPorn :: Vimeo : YouTube

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Looks Like We’ll Be Waiting Another 43 Years For Robohusbands

filed under: Design for Sex, Pop Futures by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Artificial intelligence researcher (and possibly lover) David Levy, in his recently defended thesis, “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners,” at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, argues that human/robot marriage will first be introduced in Massachusetts in the year 2050. But no need to wait for the state-sanctified confines of matrimony for robot sex; that phenomenon is predicted to hit critical mass within the next five years. As to how it will be spread?

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, “but once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” Levy said.

Or, why wait for your robohusband of the future, when you can have your robot boyfriend today?

(via Irene Kaoru; img & inspiration: Trixie Bedlam)