On the Internet, Sex, and Going Public

(I capitalized “Internet” on this one. I must be internalizing my editor, but really this is inspired by Lena Chen and the claim posed to her that “This is what everyone learns when they realize they have shared too much about themselves on the Internet.”)

It’s been ten years since a nude photograph of me appeared online, under the pseudonym Shakti.

1998. I model for a service that sells images in bulk to starter erotica sites; I’m sure they think of themselves as porn but the content seems so humbly softcore that there’s just no reason to call them porn, not now with a decade’s distance. I Photoshop one of the better images — they never give me a CD as promised, photographers rarely do — to turn it pale blue and make a website with it, called “linotte.” I use the porn because I don’t have a digital camera yet.

1999. I begin writing reviews of goth music and cultural etc. for a goth-themed porn site, using this same name. I go to South Africa and come out to some of the representatives at the interfaith conference I was attending as a stripper. I come home and spend a week mourning my grandmother by making a website called “beautifultoxin.” More photos of me, this time from the new goth porn site. I don’t say anything “personal” but you can see me fucking a girl.

2000. I blog but no one really uses that word yet. I re-post diary entries from my aborted websites in 1998 (”pornography in the notebooks of the gods”) and from “linotte” to the new “beautifultoxin.” I write new entries about drugs, and sex, and technology, and running around with boys who believe in magic in all kinds of bad New England weather. I start watching ana voog’s webcam and decide I want one after she takes hers to SXSW. ana voog starts a LiveJournal and so do I. I call it “beautifultoxin” and myself “m. Shakti.” I write:

Longterm planning ridiculousness… I always wanted life to be art and so here now I am listening to Factory-made (Velvet Underground sans Cale) mp3s and making obsessive lists. And I’m not even a speedfreak.

+fetish objects+
* CritterCams to scatter throughout
* digital camera with those memory strips
* digital video camera
* lighting kits
* microphones
* large monitors
* webs of wires to suspend cams and mikes from over the ceiling
* the Performa, laptops, and a G4 set together in a darling altar
* T1 to stream video and audio

+concepts and projects+
* Passini/Conceptual Sex-Death
* birth of the scholar-whore
* initiation into new media
* psychedelics as a playground
* communing with the new Loa
* fictionsuit
* bending narrativity and Author-authority stuff
* writing myth into ‘reality’
* enacting the novel
* collaboration with artvamp
* live anti-sex shows
* sleepcam (universal sleep station)
* autoerotica
* making online ritual un-goofy

I get completely thrown when Artvamp (Kristie Alshaibi) writes to me after that, sends me a webcam, and invites me to work with her on an immersive 24/7 webcam/diary project to become her first digital feature. I get spooked at the idea of dropping my whole life for this and possibly living dangerously close to collapse in Chicago as we do this, and drop out. She takes on the role I was to play herself, which ana voog was originally to have performed. We all LiveJournal, a lot. Since we are all (literally, too) naked now, writing about sex and men and gender and feminism and fucking and sleeping and eating and what we read and who we are obsessed by, it’s easier. Networked nakedness.

2001. I live on webcam for a class one semester. I perform once a week. I blog multiple times daily. I visit San Francisco. I decide sex and the internet would be the answer to almost every problem I face, with the exception of what name to do it all under. I advertise online as a sex worker for the first time. A Tantrika offers me a few weeks apprenticeship if I’ll help her with her website. I learn CSS. A friend gets arrested for prostitution and it almost gets even worse when it’s found out she helped design the agency’s website. After she gets out of jail she tells me we should start a national glossy magazine for sex workers, like Nerve. Nerve folds and goes web-only. I forget print. I read Evan Williams, Derek Powazek, and Jason Kottke’s blogs. I install (yes, back then, you could) Blogger as soon as it comes out. I still post webcam captures every week to an eGroup (then a Yahoo Group) of 1000 fans.

2002. I turn my job at a feminist sex-positive women’s webstore into a blogging job, at their request. Warren Ellis, my internet boyfriend, answers my blogged call to be put in touch with a fellow comic writer. I start a LiveJournal only he can read. I buy sacredwhore.org and redesign it (questionably) about twenty times before I launch it. I still claim to be a writer, not an artist and certainly not a designer. I quit my job as a camgirl for a nerd fetish softcore site when it’s clear alt.porn is already dead. I blog and get naked on my own site instead, but for free. It’s not that the blogging job let me quit getting naked on the internet; it just let me do it not just for the money.

2003. On the same day Salon announces its premium service, I get laid off from the feminist sex-positive blogging job. I go back to stripping and saving for San Francisco with renewed conviction for both. On July 16, I get to town. I call myself “Melissa Gira aka m. Shakti” on sacredwhore.org and install Movable Type between clients at the dungeon I take a job at. The Lusty Lady hires me. I re-make their website, too. I have two more names now online as a sex worker and one as a writer who is also a sex worker. The cam doesn’t make sense in San Francisco the way I wish it did. I start romancing the idea of “mobwhorelogging” when cameraphones make their way through the geek elite.

2004. I redesign sacredwhore.org and blog every day. Warren asks me for my New Years predictions and I say:

2004 will be the year that will finally start to feel like The Future. I plan to cultivate even more dangerous cults of personality and to worship what I find in the gutters with devout shamelessness. My new religion will be purveyed like any good new product, branded on its website, and available for a fee.

If 2004 could grant me one piece of hybrid tech, I would hope for a retro-tooled Dictaphone with a mini-brass funnel to wear on my wrist that leads by cord back to my laptop in my shoulder bag, or better, transmits the data back to it wirelessly, wherever it is, and saves and uploads by voice command, sliding inside of whatever network connection is closest by.

I’m going to keep not watching network news, and become even more stubborn about leaving BBC World Service and KPFA/Berkeley on at low volume on the radio whilst jacking off with strangers in the peep show booth.

I will try to forget who Paris Hilton is, and not just because I’ve had my way with nightshot smut before, and mine is prettier.

“Terror” being the prefix to everything au courant, I’m eagerly awaiting terrorcouture and terrorfuck.

2004 is me, dressed in white, priestess of the future in a Barbarella-furred and faery-lit room, putting Magic Glasses on you so all seems holographic and stellar (as it really is), scenting you with rose oil wafted off of white feathered fans, dropping a surprise on your tongue (and if you can make it to San Francisco by midnight, I’ll see you there).

2005. I get that cameraphone. I open an account at Flickr hoping it feels like webcam days but no one uses it like that. I abandon LiveJournal. I’m “Melissa Gira” when I teach a class on how to run a webcam for a conference of sex workers. I stop advertising online as a sex worker. I get a story published about the conference on Indymedia. I submit a story to a new glossy print magazine about sex work called $pread and they print it and I read it at the San Francisco launch party. I get named one of the “sexiest geeks” of the web and record my first podcast and launch Sexerati.

2006. I can’t keep track anymore. I’m Melissa now, everywhere, when I get interviewed, when I speak at conferences, when I meet cute boys who can Google me all too well and see what I’ve written about them. I leave the peep show and retire from sex work and start working at St. James Infirmary, where they’ve only ever known me as “Melissa Gira.” They cite my web presence and savvy as a reason for giving me the job, which barely existed before I took it. I start a video podcast. The camgirls are on YouTube now.

2007. I start dating the internet, or at least, boys and girls as searchable as me. Twitter takes over. All of a sudden everyone’s telling everyone their smallest boringest life. “Professional” internet people start acting like camgirls and camboys. Which is what I tell Justin.tv when I give him his first on-camera kiss. My boyfriend wears the Justin.tv camera for a week. The battery dies before we can be the first to fuck on the livestream. Nakedness means nothing to me. Now I just want good lighting for the archives. I overlook the fact that my backpack sized streaming audio recorder can carry video now, too. I’m too immersed in my phone. I go to Cambodia and Malaysia and work with more sex workers on how to use all this stuff because they need to get photos of human rights violations by cops and aid agencies off their cell phones before the authorities delete them.

2008. I’m as naked, indexed, networked, and visible as I’ve ever been. It only makes sense to take my legal last name back then, and I do when Valleywag hires me. Now I’ve gotten every job since college because of my willingness to be naked or write. San Francisco provides. I hear every day how nobody wants to look “unprofessional” and ruin their career over an offending photo or rumor. I am starting to forget how to understand that.