Hey, so! South by Southwest 2010! I have a panel up for consideration, with a group of women who a) keep my act together daily, b) have shared some of the most intense not-for-reblogging conversations with me about What It Is We Do With the Internet, and c) have made legit careers from being bare, vulnerable, sincere, creative, whipsmart and willing to share how that is.
There, that’s my confessional backstory behind “Professionally Naked: What Women Gain From Exposing Ourselves Online” featuring me, Audacia Ray, Meaghan O’Connell, and Sarah Dopp:
Can you be sexual and professional online, even if sex isn’t your job? However women get naked online — in revealing photos, or in revealing our lives – we draw scrutiny and judgment. From blogging to porn, these panelists push the lines of “respectable” behavior with honesty and success.
What I already love about this conversation — because it’s happening, it’s between late-night phone calls and even later gchats, and over scotch and cupcakes, and on buses and trains, and traded screencaptures of things we wanted to post but ask eachother for a reality check on — is that it starts from a place of, This is valuable.
I don’t want to defend oversharing. I don’t want to talk about the “dangers” and “risks.” It’s clear that women have a lot to get out of opening up online, and that to do so is not professional or social suicide. So let’s take that as our beginning. For all of us on this panel, that was our online origin story: personal blogging that became professional, but even in “going legit” and working in the industry (not the sex industry, though half the panel has gotten naked online for money) we never stopped being personal.
My three co-panelists are prolific and easy to track down, but here’s what I want to say about them, and then you can go thumb us up and we’ll see you in Austin or on the liveblog, etc.:
Sarah. Sarah was my first friend in the (ow) “social media” scene in San Francisco who also shared all the deep connections I have to queer & sex(-positive, for lack of a better word) communities. She’s been making her living from making the internet a place that more closely resembles how we actually interact with each other, and asks hard questions about how we’re being social and personal online, and is as skeptical as I think more of us need to be about how that’s getting co-opted by creepy marketers. She founded the groundbreaking online community Genderfork which is not only her her life’s big work but a brilliant platform for getting people to get real online. We talk a lot about identity, perception, and how to be supportive of other people’s messiness around the same. She pushes me to be honest with myself in ways no one else ever has. She can tell you where you need to step up and you will thank her for it.
Meaghan. We met first as writers, but also, Meaghan was the Tumblr-crush-object of just about every guy I’ve met through blogging there. So when Meaghan was hired this summer as Tumblr’s first Marketing Director, I was totally heartened not to hear any “slept your way to the top” stuff — or, closer to Meaghan’s less overtly sexual persona online, “swooned and posted vulnerable stories about sex that dudes cried to as much as they came to her way to the top.” Meaghan’s also one of the only people who knows what’s really going on inside of Tumblr, the blogging platform now most known for super-personal self-revelation, when it comes to how people are writing and sharing about sex, how many of the naked photos on the site are of its users and how many are recycled porno, and why there’s a business in that. She got where she got, in part, because she has pushed the line of how-much-is-just-right? so well herself.
Dacia. Who I think I have known the longest of everyone here, even though we’ve not lived in the same city until about four months ago. We met (sorry if you’ve heard this one before) over the course of planning a panel in a series of blog comments. Back in those humbler days in 2004, we were both doing sex work and blogging and getting into more advocacy work, and I’m not sure I knew in 2004 that all of that would lead me Where I Am Today. It certainly did for Dacia, who is the only program officer I know of in a major NGO that is also completely out about having made a feature porn film, The Bi Apple. Dacia literally wrote the book on why women get naked on the internet, and is an autorefreshing source of inspiration for me: that we can do this, that we need renounce nothing, that all that we have done makes us who we are and is precisely why we are the right ones to open up these bigger conversations about sex, selfhood, power, and what we’re here to do in this world.
Bold, I know. So someone best call dibs now on hosting that keeping-it-real post-panel pool party again. Or leave a comment about how I am a conversational dominatrix, and what you want us to get into, and who’s going to take a real video of the panel this year, and why you should be up there on that riser with us, too.
(photo: my candid of Annalee Newitz, who is not on this panel but is like a theoretical patron saint of it in my book, at the Gawker party last year in Austin)
