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.

But if you saw me pawing through my bag at half past two on the F train headed back to Brooklyn, this is what I would have told you makes it all okay:

Amazing headphones. And learning how to get in and out of them and swipe your Metrocard and balance your laptop bag and get on the train going the right way. Purchasing them is also an excuse to go into B&H for the first time, where the first salesguy will not know which headphones are iPhone compatible, but the second will, and will request to be your friend on Facebook after. I showed his profile to a friend, who instructed me to not reply, but if I did, to say no more than “Dude, I am definitely not kosher.”

Boots. All of my clothes were wrong right away, and especially the shoes. The black dresses I wore when I was sixteen and still wear were okay, but still. You cannot be a kindergoth every day. This did not stop me from buying my first Fluevogs in ten years.

Ladies. Fancy-heeled teevee women of Manhattan be damned, you really do need people to call at three in the morning. (Even if San Francisco is still awake.) I am too lucky and I will not embarrass myself or anyone else further with stories of what women-friends do. But — almost nearly unrelated — I think New York has made me a little more gay? Or at least more head-turning-ly drawn towards any outwardly queer-looking woman I see around town? (Butch/femme visibility, it’s just not what it used to be.) It’s complicated. In one weekend I got to tell a genderqueer pal, Yes I Do Too Like Girls, and a metrosexually ambiguous dude, No I Am Not A Lesbian. I miss you too San Francisco!

Good sex. Also almost nearly unrelated. Attentive readers will note that the word “sex” there does not contain a hyperlink. So but and.

Amazing photographer. Better if she can also teach you how to play poker on short notice. Sarah Sharp (aka Trixie Bedlam) and I palled around Times Square with her camera and my mic and produced the photos that will haunt me should I ever get more involved with public radio someday. A few have already made it to Time Out New York. The best one is saved just for a charity calendar to benefit Sex Work Awareness, a community-based organization in New York that produces media trainings for sex workers. I will still work it for a cause.

But more and more, I want to appear on camera completely undone. I did a series of portraits when I first got to town that are the first I’ve ever posed for, that raw and also, the first under my full name. More on those when they are ready for that kind of thing,

Proseco. Because gin is a three-letter-word for bad behavior.

The iPhone Holy Trinity: Google Maps, iTrans NYC, and Foursquare (also for where you don’t want to be).

Mascarpone. On gelato, with whatever fresh fruit you can get that doesn’t completely make you miss the Mission.

Virgin America. Hello California? What’s the weather like out there now?

Unlimited texting, unlimited weekly MTA pass. For getting lost, getting back in the right direction.

Notebook. I am starting to write better in transit: subway platforms, in line for coffee, from beds.

Local guides. My grade school “boyfriend” now lives with his partner on the Upper West Side, and recommends we go fantasy Craigslist apartment hunting as a form of tourism. And with my best city friend, we executed a comparative evaluation of Prospect Park and Dolores Park (ratio of children to dogs three feet tall or greater, bare chests to bear chests, etc.), a few Saturdays at a time. Throw in learning how to get from Rivington to Houston while not quite in one’s right mind, and I’ve got a healthy start.

Out of town guests. At least once a month, to reinforce that illusion that you live here.

Some books to swap. I managed to ship myself just over a dozen boxes of books, but not enough to keep me from borrowing off of everyone’s shelves almost immediately. Ensuring that I cannot move again, I also made sure to accrue some library fines.

Hide all my old music from myself. If I were Karl Lagerfeld, I’d have bought seven new iPods, too.

Loading up again on the black eyeliner. Because evincing all my favorite shards of 90’s subculture makes me feel as if I never left and Kim Gordon would not be a bad idea to grow up looking like.

But also because no matter how perfect I will work to make it, smearing the mess that’s left on my cheeks was always the point.

Were I stopped and questioned, all I’d get indignant about is being interrupted mid-Google Mapping my way around town (truth), or, if they just wanted my first name and age, getting denied proper attribution. But then, I’m a dirty whore and there is something, naturally, wrong with me.

Were you also unnaturally un-offended? You can borrow some huff from my own list of Other Careers Women Have The Right To Be Indignant About If Asked If They Have Ever Been A…:

• Flack. Because it is impossible to be the girl in lipstick at at any formal or informal gathering of tech types without some bright-eyed man asking, “Are you in PR?”
• Dating Columnist. Any woman who writes about sex also wants to make sure you get some!
• Marketer. See: Flack. And worse: “Twitter expert.”

We’ve all got a different bottom line. Mine is keeping myself in boots, coffee, and plane tickets without having to go on fake dates and keep an up-to-date Rolodex until the day I die. Maybe public relations really is a lot like high end escorting that way! Even so, I’d never insist you call your job anything but what it is: a living.

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)

It wasn’t until I actually had a cocktail in my hand that I remembered, fifteen year old me probably had this as one of her life goals. A sex column! I know! As terribly ambivalent as I have been for the last few years about sex writing, sex columns, and the whole business of sexpertise (as distinct from being smart about sex in a way that defies what the market tries to reign those smarts in with), I’m really happy about this opportunity to do a sex column my way.

“Embedded” launched this week with the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s sex blog, SEX SF. In keeping with this theme of late of getting right into the thick of a new project and then letting the analysis come later (a true first for me), I didn’t really get what I was doing with the column until I had to explain it at a reading on Friday night. “Embedded” is my attempt to tell real sex stories simply, to get out of the way and really let a person’s life emerge. I admitted to the audience at Femina Potens that this is probably due to my listening to way too much This American Life for the last year. What I love about Ira Glass and Co.’s approach to storytelling is that most of the time, the folks on the air are not famous, and if they are, the stories they tell are tangential to that status. “Embedded” is not a place to showcase sex celebs; instead, I want to capture the parts of San Francisco sex we rarely see.

I’m proud of what I’m doing, of tossing my little bit of framing around the bigger picture of sex here, this city I always considered my sexual center. Even as I write, I can feel that shifting, the focus that San Francisco has held for me expanding. Writing this column is a love song and a bittersweet one, because for all the great PR San Francisco sex has got going for itself, in books and blogs and all the rest, it still so often focuses on the loudest, biggest, baddest. I’m going searching for something else, lives a bit less incendiary but no less brilliant.

Now he’s back with his 2009 agenda, delivered like the others, as a kicker to his column. In it, he asks that the Obama administration pressure the Cambodian government to bust more brothels, on the premise that the risk of going to jail for selling sex will hurt brothel owners’ profits and will protect more women from abuse and violence. Yet such stings and raids are already the centerpiece of a disastrous crackdown on Cambodian prostitution. The Bush administration has supported the raids of Cambodian brothels for at least as long as Kristof has been demanding they step up a fight they are already in – and losing.

It was under threat of sanctions from the United States that prostitution was outlawed in Cambodia. The resulting government-sponsored raids on brothels did not lead to a great improvement in the lives of women and girls. Instead, the same police tasked with “liberating” women from Cambodia’s brothels have been accused by human rights groups of abusing these same women.

In a video made by members of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), one survivor of what was called a “rehabilitation center” relates the story of being gang raped by six members of the police force: “They raped me from one after the other… the last one didn’t use condom because I got only five condoms. I told him that I have HIV but he was not believe me. He said if I had HIV, would have scar on body, not so smooth.” Another woman survivor describes her time in the Koh Kor rehabilitation center. It sits on the same island that was once home to a Khmer Rouge prison and execution camp. She explains that when she asked questions about why she had been taken in against her will, and what was wrong with what she was doing, she was repeatedly beaten by her captors – the police. These are the people – the police, and the government officials who have operated brothels in a network of corruption – that Kristof would like us to trust to combat violence.

Setting a human rights agenda for the United States will be an enormous challenge for Barack Obama and his incoming administration, with a host of failed Bush campaigns to contend with. His handling of so-called “sex slavery” will be but one. When considering how he ought to proceed, to undo damage done, and to improve human rights around the globe, Obama should look not to Kristof and his urgent cries, but to those women who are currently imprisoned and violated by the people who were supposed to “save” them. To endorse brutal, violent raids and “rehabilitation” as a solution to the brutality and violence of coerced prostitution ignores the evidence that raids do nothing to discourage abusive conditions — they perpetuate them.

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.

I should be so comfortable. I have a lifestyle that prostitution has made possible — both the apartment in San Francisco and the connection to an on-call network of other sex workers who have responded to the outing of Spitzer and the escort he hired with speed and aplomb. I spent the last two days of SXSW checking in on the press statements written collaboratively (GoogleDocs pushed to its limits), getting ten emails every ten minutes with press queries, and not feeling as helpless and removed — geographically outside ground zero — as I could have. But the frenzy of the conference, the pace of which had me swapping phones with friends over breakfast and over drinks to keep up with the news, kept me safe from getting swallowed up with fear. I had about 5 minutes to decide last night how much I wanted to come out on national broadcast television. This is all too fast, and it’s how we have to move now if we want to stake some ownership in this story that’s rightly ours.

The Early Show segment ended up cut too short to bring me in. I’m still stripped raw from six days of Nerd Spring Break so it’s just as well — coming out on teevee was a decision I’m fortunate that I have more time to work it out. In the meantime everything you need in whore-media-watchdogging is going down at Bound, Not Gagged. I’ll be on my couch nursing a post-SXSW bug (in retrospect, now the morning after I started this post, the sushi was a bad idea) and hammering out more for Valleywag, which deserves a post of its own.

Here’s June 2000, when I started live weekly webcam shows, on my site beautifultoxin. Aside from getting me to write/blog every day, to build up my first community of viewers/readers, and getting me wet with many of the concepts I still work with — surveillance, celebrity, identity, performance — the cam project let me amass, with very little effort, tens of thousands of images of myself from a four year period (curiously, I killed the thing around the time Flickr launched).

I can go back and see my “flaws.” See that I have always been soft around my belly, had rounder hips than I do breasts, that my ass and breasts sit high on my body. That my forehead is prone to wrinkle up and my chin will double if not held just right to the camera. That just putting on lipstick makes me look like a different person depending on the light. That holding my arms slightly away from my body makes my hourglass figure pop but bringing them in close adds weight I don’t really have. That I do care about looking good on camera. That good to me, for me, still means slender, if not thin.

I know how to fake it, but I know that everyone knows how to fake it.

And I only really get how deep this gets me when I see something like this burlesque number from Mad Men, see a girl’s curve and shape and belly and softness and roundness and remind myself, I want to be as good to touch as I am to look at, want to feel as at home with myself at 30 as I did at 20 as I wished I did, and maybe really did, at 10. When all I wanted, by the way, was “a real woman’s body,” and that was, at the time, just like this:

(I know, she’s also a glamorous femme, a stripper, a dancer. But wait for the lingering shot as she slides her gown down her hips. That should not be shocking.)