I usually use my tumblr for this sort of notetaking, but for the sake of all of it one place (and having more than one video to go with it), here’s some of what I’ve been watching, in all its bashed-up, barely captured and YouTubed resolution — the next lifesaving blonde icon of us daughters of the pop 90’s. First there was Laura Palmer (we’ve killed that one), and now, Madonna.

Truth of Dare. My mother canceled our MTV after the 1984 “Like A Virgin” performance. My godmother was the one allowed to hint to me that Madonna existed. She took my nearly albino cousin, not me, to go see her, with sprayed red M’s on their white-blonde hair. My mother flipped the channel in silent embarrassment when an afternoon show tried to explain how controversial the “Like A Prayer” Pepsi ad was while showing as little of it as possible. My mother helped me get on birth control. She reminded me often to “be modest.”

So with my bedroom door shut, I taped Madonna off the radio I got on my own in seventh grade, and made out with my first boy to “Crazy For You” and insisted a best girlfriend give me the new Immaculate Collection on CD because I wanted it forever and I knew it was all silly but Madonna was the first thing I liked that everyone liked and the first thing that made me love about myself what no one else did: my desire to be desired myself, my affection for fame, my messy and upsetting need to be loved.

My mother believes in appearances of the Blessed Virgin.

Someone broke into the house where I grew up, where my mother still lived, right before Christmas the year after I’d gone to college. We always wondered it if was my father, because of what was rifled through (divorce papers, financial statements), what was left behind (all the Christmas presents). Only one actual valuable was stolen: my mother’s gold rosary from Medugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina. I’m not sure what kind of gold it was, or how much it was worth: she told me it had turned to gold when children to whom the Blessed Virgin had appeared had held it.

“It was kind of my protection,” she said.

I did my Catholic best and went to a gift shop in the suburbs near Boston, the kind that sells saints for bedside tables and tall votive candles in rainbow colors, that were it on Mission and 24th Street in San Francisco or Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or South Street in Philadelphia, she would never dream of entering, even if the inventory was identical. I go into all of those. I feel better in the ones in cities, where my Catholicism is as complicated as anything I could get over-the-counter in there.

The only Medugorje rosary I could find her was silver, but I got it for her anyway, telling her it had been blessed, too. That I had to do myself, kneeling for the last time before the peach-lit statue of Mary in the Church in which I was raised. I never called her the Blessed Virgin, the Holy Mother. There was always another Madonna who came first.

Laugh, cry, rend your fishnets and ask for extra credit: Eliot Spitzer is now an adjunct political science professor at City College of New York, teaching a three hour section once a week on law and public policy. In another reality commanded by the New York Post, he’s also plotting a return to office.

I was not serious, New York, when I lamented not being on the ground in March 2008 to cover his “downfall” from having “availed himself” of the “services” of a “prostitution ring” — and a porn-load of other gross, gross metaphors that do nothing resembling fair reporting on the fact that “Client 9″ is no different than scores of other elected officials who are happy to legislate and enforce prostitution as far as they can from the guilty, nasty, professional sex they enjoy in expense-accounted suites.

(And they are so guilty. You can see how guilty quite a bit on MSNBC. Or at Slate.)

It’s not happening. And if I’m wrong, you can tease me for ever having shamefully hoped I might get my chance at him.

(image: my inbox, just last week.)

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)

I’m eating chicken breasts and thighs with my fingers tonight, in honor of the first night I got to seriously spend time with Annie Sprinkle. To all the whore sisters who’ve been questioning my sanity of late, this story is for you:

(“Annie’s Breasts,” Northampton, MA 2003, and read with the love you’d give a poor little rich girl)

This would have to be the first story. Annie’s breasts. My own mother’s brand of maternal love, that being suffocation, denial, and repression, kept me from going after that golden oldie of psychotherapy, the comfort of the tit. Throwing my head on momma’s boobies, and just letting out a cathartic, helpless wail was not in my cards, not until I was twenty three years old, alone in San Francisco, letting loose a little torrent of tears into the cleavage of Annie Sprinkle.

A few years after, when my actual cards were being read by my teacher, Mary, she asked me, “Does Inanna have any mothering qualities to you? Because that’s what you need right now. You need to know that your mother loves you. Not your birth mother. She’s not happening. You need to know, and not just know, but feel, in your whole being, that the Goddess is your mother and she loves you.”

It doesn’t sound like, “Jesus loves me, this I know, cause the child molesting priest, he told me so.” Not really. I’m sure a part of me felt so still, held mom at arm’s length still. My mom, my real mom, I knew it, was a whore — not the one whose cunt I first knew, but the one whose cunt first taught me. My cunt. My own.

I was my own whore-momma, until Annie. It wasn’t a new age rebirthing with crystal dildos or forced labor breaths that owed more to porno than Lamaze. It was just me, standing on uneasy legs in a tiny black box theatre in the Mission, holding onto candy I bought in the lobby to benefit some leftie-sex political cause. Annie was in front of me, taking questions from the stragglers. My legs were still gooey from the massage she gave me mid-show, cooing, “Are you old enough to be here? Does your momma know you’re here?” in that voice you use with clients, but that didn’t split us up — even though it should have, it didn’t. I had paid to be here, and if my self-consciousness had gotten out of the way, I would have told you, if you were the ticket taker, Yes, I’m here for a religious experience.

So Annie had run her Magic Wand (made by Hitachi, in this instance), over my shoulders and neck and back, as a twenty year old image of her flickered on the screen behind her, of starlet Annie with a similar vibrator on her pussy. I don’t remember much except I couldn’t overcome my total body silence, which, if you have ever shared a sexual experience with me, especially one running heavy with whoring, you’d know was dangerous. Am I dissociating, or helplessly blissed? The line is awfully thin.

“Come back to Northampton, Annie,” I said to her bosom, as we melted into an embrace. I thanked her for sending traffic to my website, sacredwhore, which was linked partially as a mistake from her site, as she knew the woman who used to own it. “Yes, I saw that — keep it up,” she said, in that heavy-light sigh. When I finally made it back to the car, I wept and wept. The trip home detoured to Ocean Beach so I could scream at the Pacific, “How am I supposed to do this? Why am I supposed to do this?”

I didn’t use the word problematic, but I would have if it weren’t so cold. Annie’s problematic, sacred whoring is problematic, being stuck for another two weeks in San Francisco with less than a hundred bucks is problematic. Between all the choices, I pitted working-class survival wits against adopted-elitist academese, and went with the most profitable (and therefore, least “problematic”) option. I did my first massage call and the fever broke.

Whore fever. What soothes it is salt water, and cash. Like the well-stocked womb I made for myself, where I’ve got a full bookshelf and my laptop and incense and my candles from the city I love like heaven, and not just heaven for whores. It’s never clear-cut, never one or the other, just spiritual, just for the money. It’s to stop the fever, and it’s to stay alive. It’s for God the Momma and for God Inside of Me. It’s for my cunt and for my wallet, and when those slits start melding more, the fever may break forever. Right now I just ask Momma for a healing salve when I start burning up, and when She comes, I do, too.

Roxanne M. Carter (kore) influences me to stick with the web, always. Her original site, at the sadly dead prettie.com, got me bugged about the web diary as legitimate storytelling.

This was in 1998.

We’ve never met. I’ve only ever heard her voice now that she has a videoblog. This is the most recent.

[edited to add: I'm gravely abusing the tumblelog. So much more is happening there. Best intentions, etc. etc. This tends to be how it shakes out for me. Solution? See above. Stick with it.]

“If experimentalism was once publicly possible and openly debated, if now such discussions are played out surreptitiously and behind closed doors, exposed to view only courtesy of scandal, does this make scandal a media society’s substitute for the town forum? Like town forums, scandals provide venues for staging social issues, for negotiating social boundaries and possibilities, for having ethical debates –”

Beautiful. I no longer feel dirty for getting a heart-on for gossip.

But hold up, wait a minute:

” — unlike town forums, the opportunity for sustained reflection is not incredibly high. Outrage substitutes for thought and vicariousness for social criticism, expose for principled discussion. None of this makes scandal a demonstration of enlightened or progressive thinking, and politically speaking the outcomes are unpredictable.”

In other words, yes, “Stars, they’re just like us!” is an undeniable contribution to civic discourse, but just because it does not so much harm to us, does it really do good by the citizenry, either?

(Once upon a winter in 1998, I kept a tally on my television: Cock. War. Clinton’s dick won by a landslide. Iraq? Well. We know how that continued.)

But I’m watching this video, of (and everyone lately asks me, who?) Julia Allison (editor-at-large for Star magazine) and Jakob Lodwick (of Vimeo, who also hosts the clip, but can you call it hosting? blip.tv, where most of my video lives, hosts; Vimeo hosts a community, too) talking about their relationship.

I’ve been working on a larger post on this for Sexerati, on having a relationship in public; on these two, specifically, but of course it’s also a reason to very publicly reflect on — and then have my own — relationship in public. Would this help? Should we record our intimate conversations? Are we more honest in bed, yes. With a camera on? (It would not be the first time he & I have shared that end of a camera. The first time we were ever asked, “So, is this official?” was in the middle of an online video conference with four (at my quick count, and yes, I counted) cameras pointed in our direction.)

Posting. Calling. In that order, and that just has to be okay.

(And if I said to myself, “I may take this down in the morning,” it would be just for the pleasure in watching that sentence stay there all the longer.)