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Thursday, January 11, 2007

We Are the Sex Media: Of Super Sex & The Erotic Echo Chamber

filed under: We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira

Susie Bright reveals her internet crush on Britain’s finest sex-positive source, Dr. Petra Boynton, pointing to Dr. Petra’s right-on sex predictions for 2007. Well, right on, in that, we hope they don’t come out just quite like this, but given her track record, and honestly, the slowly turning wheels of the sex future, it’s some erotic intelligence worth giving a hard, long look at.

Specifically of interest to Sexerati is what Dr. Petra dubs the selling of “Super Sex“:

The emphasis of media coverage will be around positions, body parts, hormones, techniques and activities with little information on communication, culture, choice and pleasure. It’s anticipated this media coverage will be hugely popular, but will also create more questions and anxieties in audiences who probably won’t find the information easy to act upon and will blame themselves when they don’t get the best sex ever or become the best lover in the world.

This is what (as they used to say at Sassy) really works my nerves about what passes for the coverage of sex in the media, this tension between the need for more attention to be paid to sex, but of how absolutely inadequate those column inches usually end up.

So we get, on the one hand, this tired framing of the Anglo-American attitude towards sex as Puritanical — which is a hack job of an excuse, honestly, for such poor attention given to sex. In the mainstream media, at least, is anybody still trying to cover sex up with some stiff woolen sackcloth? If anything, sex is everywhere in the media, but when a global media outlet turns its lens on it, we’re still just getting a Britney-esque glimpse up sex’s dress.

The reframing of sex media itself as a form of sex education, rather than the wraparound for ads that it often is, means that if people who are already anxious about sex can be made to feel as if following “these ten easy steps” will bring them salvation, if not at the very least, an orgasm, you can bet that’s what will get printed.

But what does that mean for sex journalists and media makers clamoring to get in a nuanced bit about how people come to feel so sexually inadequate in the first place? About the conditions under which sex is bought and sold — and not just in what people think of as the sex industry, but in the business of sex education and what passes for it? That story might disrupt the self-congratulatory tale of mainstream sex journalism itself, that we have at last shed our Victorian past and can openly discuss sex… but only if we can put an affiliated product link on it. Not to sound like The Economist about it, but how does that give my sex life more value?

Enter the independent sex media. Indie sex media opened the conversation around sex — like Our Lady of the Indie Sex Press, Susie Bright, with On Our Backs, and countless others in the early and middle 90’s, whipsmart d.i.y. sexperts cranking out zines and websites and now, blogs and podcasts. Being our own sex media gives us an opportunity to not just speak our minds, but to articulate a sexual ethic based on the virtues Dr. Petra soothsays as so absent, and yet so needed right now: communication, culture, choice and pleasure.

To stem the well-anticiapted tide, then, I’m officially crowning 2007 as The Year We Are the Sex Media. For this work, please indulge me in suggesting the following:

Let us not devolve into an erotic echo chamber, speaking only to our tight community of other indie sex people. This allows us to better assess the impact our work has outside the communities in which we create it, and not feel as if we’re endlessly preaching to a tiny converted.

Let’s stay ever-conscious of how powerful the mainstream media still is in making the rules of the sex story game. We’ll always be able to move faster and with more flexibility, but we still have to think about how we operate within the field they try to claim as their own.

Lastly, let’s stay focused not on outdoing each other, but creating more ways to reach more people, period. The story of sex is huge and we all have a role and a stake in telling it. Let’s always come back to the question — how much more relevant can our stories be, when held up against the endless commercial that is your average magazine feature on how to fuck?

My answer is, really, how can they not be?

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