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.

“You’ve never been one of them,” one of my friends told me after I leaned on her to decompress from one of the most male-dominated, fuck male-dominated, suit-dominated conferences I’d ever attended. Not one of them, being, the women, the dozen or so women in the room who, if I’d been more naive, I’d be assuming would have my back.

“I bet they never see you coming,” said one of my bosses once. “I bet you clean up nice.” She was tattooed, older than me, had a graduate degree I’m still years from, and was the new executive director of the nonprofit health clinic that had just hired me. My job was to hustle — to write grants, get us money, keep us afloat. “How do you feel about sitting across from a table full of old men in suits and asking them for money?” a former board member asked me. “That sounds like what I do all the time,” I said.

I started in on this thing, about passing, in a comment on Dacia’s post on class and elitism in the sex industry — on how, without visible body mods, with white skin, with blonde (not as natural as it could be) hair, and WASPy looks (I’m Italian and Catholic, actually), I get away with a hell of a lot more than a filthy whore like I supposedly am is supposed to get away. I’ve been in and out of academia, of faith organizations, with NGO’s, circled the tech scene, the sex industry itself — all of these male-dominated spaces. I’m comfortable in them. If anything, it’s because I’ve seen the same men who dominate them, naked and on their knees and crying and aching and handing me their cash for the honor.

But aside from that? I’ve been lucky. I’ve never had a straight male boss. I’ve worked in female-dominated workplaces, for female-dominated boards, with female-dominated supervision. I sat on my first corporate board of directors when I was 26. All of that comes from having spent as much time in the non-profit world as I have in the sex industry, and in my last job, at the sex worker health clinic St. James Infirmary, the marriage of both.

When I enter a room of suits (like the conference last week, which was called Supernova and was concerned with the business of the internet and which I was covering for Valleywag), it’s never the women who put me at instant ease. It’s the the other freaks: the femmey guys, the queers, the girl with the lip ring, the boy with the crazy boots. The women in tech I once looked to for support, though they may have once thought I was a cute enough anomaly to tolerate when I could be their Token Whore Speaker, are not the instant allies the web sisterhood wants you to believe they are. It’s not okay to say this, but I’m scared that for most women, period, feminism is no longer about breaking the rules men have set, but learning men’s rules well enough to seem like they’re playing along. But that’s probably exactly what some women think I’m doing when I take (or took) my clothes off for money. I’m out of reasons to explain why it wasn’t. I can point to my home, my city, my lovers, my friends, my community, my work as reasons, as proof — that I made it in my own fucking Sinatra way, and that my voice is worthy.

Last night Nick and I went to see Taylor Mac, a wholly fierce drag performer, at a little theatre half a block from the Infirmary. I bumped into two of my co-workers, Blake — a podcaster and phlebotomist and filmmaker — and Ginger — a burlesque performer and researcher. Both are shaking shit up in the world in ways that are so severe, from organizing support groups for transgender women with HIV to volunteering to translate for sex worker human rights activists in Taiwan to just fucking showing up at the clinic to do what needs to be done. They smiled and were warm and we just went back to being family in our tiny hellos on a dark street.

Taylor Mac sings ukulele-accompanied love songs about Saddam Hussein and Lynne Cheney, gets a straight audience member to dress in a magenta mylar deconstructed frock and sing “The Revolution Will Not Be Masculinized.” Before he started he asked all the heterosexuals to raise their hands, and here Nick does and I don’t and no one really notices. Even walking around the Mission and holding hands and eating ice cream and looking for all intents and purposes like a painfully straight couple on a day of gay marriage in a month of queer jubilation, we could still get away with snickering at the out of town lesbians who were too overwhelmed to cross 16th and Valencia Streets — not for being dykes, but for being tourists. There are places in this city that permit slippage and ones that don’t. We just spent three days in one that certainly didn’t, washed it away with a decent amount of complimentary white wine and a few bouts of sweaty unexpected summer night sex. I felt badly about feeling badly for the Supernova conference goers who couldn’t, but then, I also got relief just walking home and plotting the removal of my corporate drag as soon as I got in the door. But that’s the thing: for me, it’s drag. I spent as much as on my two custom pinstripe wool skirts as I did on a leather corset and a latex dress: because they are fetish, and I only have to wear them when I really want to.

Taylor talks about drag bombs, that he wished he could drop from the sky to hit people rushing head-down to their desks every morning. He says he is fearless because his mentor, a drag queen named Mother Flawless Sabrina, was once shot in the ass as she was walking down the street in New York in all her finery. “Mother Flawless Sabrina, that is awful that is awful that is AWFUL what those men did to you!” he exclaimed.

And of course I dress business sexy when I want to. Of course I work a room. I work everything I’ve got. Once it was called survival. Now I call it work.

“No, no, honey,” Mother Flawless Sabrina told Taylor Mac. “It wasn’t.”

And if that makes other women fearful, that these rules don’t scare me, that I’ve fought and found a way within them, that I have community enough outside them to hold me so when I go to those dull places, I know laughter and wetness and joy and drunkenness and pleasure and bare skin and love is waiting for me when I leave them, that even as they sustain me, that they don’t define me?

“They weren’t bad people,” said Mother Flawless Sabrina. “They just wanted to be part of the show.”

That I’ve been fucking on my couch because I always intended to get a new one and have no idea how to care for this one. Groceries on any reasonable schedule. (Have not ignored eating. Eating has been lush, with lots of excuses/reasons to get inside lots of heads — girls, boys, good fortune, yes.) That I launched a blog that needs an exit. That people still listen. That my bio page image was busted. That someone nice messaged me on [----] and I should have written back so much sooner. That there were 48 people I don’t know wanting to be my ‘Friend.’ That there was a time to say that without connoting status. That that status is imaginary. That I tell stories. That all of this is imaginary. That I am heartbroken. That I have been for a year. That it’s real. That we’re real. That I keep on going on even when I don’t write, when I’m not in the same room with you, when you don’t write. That I’m here. That this matters even when I don’t know what it means anymore. That what I have done, matters.

I’m being a lot more open on my tumble log, but because I am restricted. How information moves there — a video posted elicits comments, that elicit repost, not to mention back channel email and other conversations — fascinates me. Aggregate truth. Something intimate. “The last refuge on the Internet for girls,” Nick said. For the lack of comments. But it’s not that. The narrative flow of a blog is so expansive, it’s easy to get lost in your own myth, in the details, in being grandiose. When your contribution is so neatly framed, and your choices for how to express yourself purposefully limited (hello, twitter, which still only asks, “What are you doing?”), the tension that comes from being “constrained” produces a taut, dense result: both in content, and (it’s premature) community.