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)

Somehow, I got away with telling a room of sexology students that the business of sexpertise was dead. And I think they trusted me, even, because no one came for my “millenial” head.

There’s right there my slides, and here’s my notes:

You’ve all seen these 50’s hygiene films, right? Like “As Boys Grow“? I love this guy at the end.

That style of sex ed hasn’t died, not really. You just don’t need to wait for a guy with a Super 8 camera to come crash your gym class. Here’s what five people made in Chicago over one weekend: The Midwest Teen Sex Show.

Wow, so — what happened? In sex ed moving online — into blogs, message boards, and video shows — sex ed has the opportunity to be conducted peer-to-peer, not just top-down from professionals. It’s definitely fast, cheap, and out of control — and that’s a good thing. It’s opening new ways to reach a new audience. At the Midwest Teen Sex Show, hundreds of emails come in from the tens of thousands of viewers. Nikol, Guy, and Brittney aren’t trained sex educators in a conventional sense, and yet they have the audience, and their audience needs them.

1994. Here’s how I got my first sex ed online, as a pretty precocious teenager. No one on alt.sex.bondage knew I was sixteen and living in a Catholic suburb of Boston.

Let’s talk about the 90’s, seriously? There was this notion that everyone online was just there posing as some sexual projection, like it was all the same three guys in raincoats with pink panties underneath. That nobody would want to be themselves, or want real information from real people. The Internet was understood as a fantasy playground, totally disconnected from one’s “real” self. This is when it was especially trendy to talk about virtual sex, teledildonics, and a lot of other nonsense that never came to pass or catch on.

Scarleteen was one ray of light in the 1990’s. Here’s what it looked like in 2000, and here’s the message boards today, over ten years after it began. Scarleteen proved that a sex educator could come up from her own community — in Heather Corinna, its’ founder. That a community could build trust, even when anonymous. Heather’s told me that some of those same users are still around today. It’s the model much of online sex ed followed, and rightly so.

2001. America does really get online. Maybe it was 9/11. Internet social scientists love to argue this point out. We still don’t know what it is, but all of a sudden, what were our personal blogs — and here’s my really embarrassing personal blog from 2001 to 2003 on Livejournal — were read by a much larger audience.

We started to see the impact our personal words had. That we didn’t have to segment ourselves to be read: that we could mix up sex, politics, health information, and random intimate day-to-day details, and be meaningful in a very different way to our readers. We gained their trust by seeming real in a very impersonal media landscape. Like this community for sex workers on Livejournal: there’s news, anecdotes, requests for advice, all in the same space.

Our community’s are all the stronger for this. There was no longer the need for a filter. Look at strap-on.org — questions about sex work, health, and relationships all mixed up together, all holding equal weight. I encourage you to spend some time in these spaces. You could learn a lot about what sex workers, or crossdressers, or queer kids, are really talking about — are really saying that they need.

I know this raises the question — if anyone can do this, who are the experts?

Here’s how Sex Etc. and ISIS (Internet Sex Information Services) use MySpace. As organizations, they’ve gone into the places where their community hangs out, and they’ve gone in with their organizational face on. That’s useful, and helpful. It lets them promote their work and wear their “official” hats.

But compare that with the MySpace pages of educator and media maker Audacia Ray and podcaster and superstar Sister Roma. Hanging out on Audacia and Roma’s pages is like getting to hang out with a friend. Following the links they give, watching their videos, flipping through their photos — you can learn so much about sex, with a depth unlike what may be taught in a classroom or workshop, and it has the weight of being communicated by someone you may feel like is already part of your community. Audacia teaches human sexuality at Rutgers, and Roma is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — they both have deep connections to sexual health and sex community. There’s a power in learning from people who wear that hat — of being a member of an organization or institution — but venues like MySpace let them be both professionals and approachable people.

Organizing w/o organizations.
educating w/o institutions

This is the boat a lot of sex professionals will find ourselves in: between roles, between clear organizational affiliations, but doing our work as the community allows and requires (and funding makes possible). There’s so much that individuals can accomplish together outside the rubric of a 501c3 or the academy: look at Wikipedia. Here’s what it says right now about sex education. We may not agree with everything in this entry, or may find it false. But the way its been written collaboratively shows where the disagreements about what good sex education are. We can step in and add to that conversation. The fact that it’s still controversial means there’s a huge audience for our work.

Okay, this is my favorite quote about what I’m trying to explain, and it sounds Buddhist or straight out of Marin County, but it’s not, it’s by Clay Shirky:

“We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems too squishy and too private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private…

Now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution.

Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material.”

Clay isn’t sex-positive. Well, he might be. I don’t know. But what he does for a living? Explain the Internet, to corporations and to students at New York University. But here, right here, in his quote about Wikipedia? It’s the ethic we’ve been fighting for: to share our knowledge, to recognize one another’s expertise, and to find a sustainable way to do that.

To me, this move, from top-down to peer-to-peer sex ed, and the evolution in general of how information is created and shared online, signals: the end of sexpertise. It never made sense for sex educators and clinicians to aspire to be the Next Dr. Ruth. In truth, the role of “sexpert” is largely one created by marketing, to create a job for sex educators. And in reality, most of those who consume sexperts advice don’t do so out of a reasoned choice: it’s just that the media told them, this is how to learn about sex, from a sexpert. Not that most people even believe there’s anything to learn about sex in the first place. The sexpert is more an entertainer than an educator. A personality. A way to make a living talking about sex in a world that doesn’t really know what to do with a sex educator anyway.

We don’t need that anymore. It doesn’t work anymore.

So, what’s our place in all of this? If there’s no need for “experts,” what do sex educators do, then? Online, anyway, our expertise is absolutely essential when it comes to the future of sex ed. That’s in Curation, Collaboration, and Community. We need to gather and explain what sites most impact us, and why. When we see that this job is too big for one educator alone, we need to be unafraid to collaborate with others to do it. And working together, we build trust and intimacy. We share ownership over this work. We build a commons of sex knowledge.

Two quick examples from my work:

RenegadeCast, a podcast created by and for sex workers in partnership with the St. James Infirmary, an occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers and their partners. Rather than create an online show for sex workers, we trained sex workers to make the show ourselves. We need to tell our own stories.

And I know, doing this — changing our thinking — it can feel awkward at first. This is Boffery. Boffery is a website that allows you to share parts of your sexual life and history with trusted friends and lovers, and to tell stories and share advice together in a protected place online. I didn’t anticipate I’d end up as the co-founder of a start-up, but now — given what still needs to be said about sex — I guess it all makes sense. I want to create a space where a community can recognize each other as the experts, as the one’s who say what matters about sex. We already have the answers. We just need a place to get down to it.