I first met Stephanie Hankey like nearly every amazing woman I’ve met in the last ten years — over the Internet. The NGO that Stephanie co-founded, Tactical Tech Collective, was beginning a project for sex workers who use technology for advocacy, and I had been brought on to work with her and Tactical Tech’s Movement Building lead, Dirk Slater (who took this lovely photo). Tactical Tech is at the absolute forefront of keeping technology relevant, accessible, and powerful, for advocates and the communities we are part of and serve. I’ve never had so much asked of me and been so thankful for it.

When I try to explain Tactical Tech and Stephanie (its Executive Director) to people who have never been to one of their trainings — like the Info-Activism Camp in Bangalore this February — what I try to capture is her conviction and her resilience. Working through all kinds of barriers — whether that’s language and geography, or finding the funding, or getting a workshop going in spite of intermittent electricity — Stephanie guides us all in holding space for truly diverse groups of people to learn together, from each other.

Tactical Tech’s ethos is that nobody knows everything, and everybody knows something. It’s a beautiful philosophy, but it plays out pragmatically, as well. How else do you get so many people to huddle around laptops showing each other around a new CMS (especially with a very inviting pool outside)? The crazy thing is, we keep asking for more. I met people at the Bangalore camp who come back to Tactical Tech’s events to re-orient themselves as much as to pick up new skills. An international, mobile, multi-issue community has formed through Tactical Tech. It’s not just Tactical Tech or Stephanie’s network — it’s all of ours now who make it, to lean on one another, to collaborate and co-conspire, to take inspiration from and take solace in — because this work can still be as exhausting as it is energizing.

For the hundreds, and likely thousands, of people who, through Tactical Tech, have taken their power, claimed their rights, and carried that work on to countless others, thank you, Stephanie, for your vision, and your willingness and your perseverance. There’s still something radical in doing it ourselves, but something even more powerful in doing it ourselves together.

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.

It’s been almost four years since I’ve done a reading at Femina Potens, I know — and since then, Madison Young’s labor of porno-fueled love (sincerely, her feminist art space is built “one anal scene at a time,” she says) has jumped across town from the outskirts of the Mission into a space that was once home to another queer San Francisco institution, Image Leather.

So come out and celebrate geek love with us in time for (oh I know) Valentine’s Day. I’ll be reading something from the collection of stories that I’ve been working on for a few years about my sexual history with the internet — which are also a sexual history of the internet because I am precocious and lucky.

Details, details:

Femina Potens proudly presents SIZZLE, the monthly Bay Area award winning literary erotica series. SIZZLE heats up the Castro every month, merging internationally acclaimed queer and erotic authors with the Bay Area’s top emerging local writers, spoken word artists and performers. SIZZLES’s open mic performances regularly reveal the bravest, hottest, most eclectic performers that the Bay Area has to offer.

This February, Femina Potens is celebrating geeky, Sci Fi love and lickable literary adventures of the nerdsome variety. Come parade your highest Pong score with the queer literary legends, titillating transformers and sexy scientists of Femina Potens. SIZZLE is proud to present Chica Boom (voted Miss Gay Latina) with a seductive Sci Fi burlesque act. Francesca Ochoa, writer and activist for the ground breaking Art XX magazine, will entice us with her electrifying writing on eels. Jeff Stroker will intermix the periodic elements of S&M and Atari into a collision of come-hither coitus, performance and writing. Melissa Gira Grant, sex blogger and sex worker activist, will obsessively orate the hottest of Internet love legends.

Femina Potens will host a Q&A panel with authors and performers after the reading, and dares all to cultivate dialog and tap into the creative process of the wordsmiths and sexy geniuses in our communities.

Deeply touch your own inner geek this Friday Feb 13th, 2009 at 8pm at Femina Poten’s Sizzle.

Sizzle hosted by:

Femina Potens curator, international award winning Bondage Model and Feminist Porn Star – Madison Young.

Feb 13th 2009 @ 8:00 pm
Doors/Open Mic Sign-up @ 7:30 pm
$10–15 sliding scale admission ($5/open mic performers) for an evening of hot words, buttery pop corn and cheap beer.

Femina Potens has limited seating availability so advanced online ticket purchase is highly recommended through Brown Paper Ticketing, or visit Femina Potens for guaranteed seating information and advance ticket sales.

(photo via Femina Potens)

This just in from some fabulous activists at St. James Infirmary — the nation’s only for & by sex worker health clinic, and one of my second homes: the Coalition to Save Public Health in San Francisco needs people to come speak out against Mayor Gavin Newsom’s mid-term budget cuts that would mean the end of crucial services to sex workers, GLBT adults & teens, homeless youth, and harm reduction services to folks of all kinds struggling just to get by.

They’re calling for a vote to reduce the damage of the cuts now, and for a special election to put these cuts before San Francisco voters, and need a big turnout in support at this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting on January 27th. The whole organizing effort is collaborative, between all kinds of community people working in HIV prevention, harm reduction, sexual health services, and mental health services, and sex workers have been at the forefront of this fight.

Can’t make it? You can follow along at the hearing on Tuesday with the @SaveHealthSF Twitter account, and also on Flickr and the Save Public Health blog.

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.

This Wednesday, December 17th was the 6th Annual Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers — with over 20 documented observances around the world, vigils and marches & memorials & protests. I took on bringing together the San Francisco vigil. A huge part of our local sex worker community had gone to Washington, DC to march on the Department of Justice, read the names of sex workers that we’ve lost to violence, issue some very cogent and community-driven demands to the incoming Obama administration. Bringing the San Francisco vigil together was my way of recommitting to the local: after two years of focusing on international activism, and a year of trying my best to be both a journalist and an activist but coming up stretched thin the whole way, it was a risk I wanted to take. Maybe no one would come. We all think this before every party.

On Wednesday afternoon, just as the sun started to slip behind Twin Peaks, just as I was headed out of my place and over to the Hall of Justice, which is what San Francisco City & County government call their jail and court and where we decided to convene our vigil, I saw that Dacia had twittered that her speech for the New York City vigil was posted online. In typical Max Fischer “It was totally improvised!” fashion, I hadn’t even written my own speech yet — Dacia’s words were all I had going in to the San Francisco vigil, even as Kirk Read, who met us on the steps, walked into the Hall of Justice with me and stood with me as I told the sheriff’s office staff at the door that we’d be holding a vigil out front shortly. “Some people don’t believe in telling them first,” said Kirk. So we told, not asked.

Kirk & Sadie performed two powerful pieces, and Shelly & Acire from Sex Workers’ Outreach Project spoke about the value of coming together in opposition to police harassment & violence done against our people, and Naomi led a moment of silence and then marched us down Bryant Street, up Sixth Street, and over to Mission Street — past St. James Infirmary, and to the Center for Sex & Culture. And with our march delivered there to the memorial, I passed my Mary Magdalene candle to Annie Sprinkle, and kissed Gina on the forehead, and slipped away with Nick and had soup and dim sum and a little guilt over needing to slip away.

Dacia’s words were about needing to take care of ourselves. “Even when it seems like there’s nothing but struggle in front of us,” I said, on the steps of the jail and courthouse, we need to take care of ourselves. Why did I guilt myself for needing to eat, be held, and be comforted after that night? Why are so many of us used to pushing ourselves to the breaking point? There is too much risk already in this work, in moving in the world as those who carry so much of people’s sexual shame and fear and pain. I don’t want to care for my community from that place, of near martyrdom. So why do I hold myself to that impossible standard, of going and going and going until I can’t?

There is always more to do. There is always further to go. But even in a world that reviles us most of the time, will click and page-turn hungrily to read about our trauma all of the time, we took charge of the mic ourselves for a night, all over the world, and said, Here we are, we are still surviving, we are still here. And the more of us there are, the more we can share this work, the harder & smarter we can fight, and a million other platitudes I’m sure I’ve been handed for years about activism, which right now, in this moment, mean we all have the permission to step back and be held and fed dumplings, that holding our own alone is not what makes you “good” for a cause, that the cause is us.

May no one utter our names on these steps and in these streets in memory of a life ripped short. If we don’t take time to hold each other, our voices may start to break from all our needed sounding out:

Never again, Ruby and countless nameless other transgender women, picked up off one street and left for dead on another, their murders ignored, their killers at large.

And never again, Eliot Spitzer & Randall Tobias & Harlan “Shock And Awe” Ullman, politicians glad to fuck us over for their cause, and also glad to fuck us for a fee, and then go free themselves, while we hang.

DIRTY DIRTY QUEERDOES FOR DALY

And somehow I’d escaped the term “queerdo,” in my years of verbal torment from public school students. Mostly, they called me a freak. Sometimes, a witch. Usually, they’d append it all with dyke. Being queer and strange, it was all the same to them — just like getting harassed for it was just part of growing up outside of a real city (which, with syringes and condoms, also teem with grown-up gay people).

The fifteen year old part of me, that’s still a riot grrrl, and really wishes she’d had the courage and foresight to start a band called Ramona and the Quimbys? She’s definitely a queerdo.

I’m a bad gay myself. I keep sleeping with boys. I’m a bad straight. I keep on fucking, and not getting married. I don’t think I’ll ever get married, even though I almost did when I was 23. I don’t think I’ll ever be gay or straight. Bisexual is a term that barely even fits. I gave up on this notion that I’d only ever want to sleep with or love someone of “my gender” or its “opposite” a long time ago. I don’t even know what the “opposite” of my sex is anymore. I forgot before I even moved to San Francisco.

So for lack of a better word, queerdo will do.

And if I have a generation — I barely have one of those, straddling X and Y as my birthday does — we’re the queerdoes. We don’t fit. We grew up with the internet. We barely had to come out. We’re hyper and more likely to get our community organizing chops from teaching our baby queer friends how to have safer sex with a latex glove, how to sneak into a dyke bar, how to cruise boys on the subway, than how to organize a rally. We learned what we know about politics from fucking and keeping our communities together amidst all the fucking. We’re spastic and driven and can do eight things at once.

My queer community welcomed me as warmly as its designated sex party planner as it did when I dragged the PA up to the student union steps for National Coming Out Day. There’s a photo. I have an awkward butch hairdo. I look more like, as Gina de Vries puts it so delicately, “femme chicken” than the earnest lesbian I thought I was supposed to be.

We can do all of that, the rallying and the loving. We just don’t always get credit for it from the folks who came before us. Who hire straight PR people to be their face rather than risk us, the wrong kinds of gays, getting too much press.

And it’s been like this, since I was 17, when my closeted health teacher took my best friend and I into her classroom to lecture us for having run around with the Lesbian Avengers, waving the evidence in our face — the front page of the Boston Globe, with a photo from the Pride parade featuring topless women in black leather suspenders making out on a float, that was really just a queen-sized mattress, which they crashed the Parade with after being denied a permit.

We got the message: we’re going to have to figure out how to survive on our own, if even our gay elders aren’t going to stick their necks out for our right to be young for ourselves. And so we didn’t rally around the right to marry, to be a soldier, to buy a nice house in the nice part of town with our nice spouse. We went to work in health clinics, and faith organizations, and started magazines, and made porn, and went to demonstrations against war and war and war and took home the cute people, and kept warm together in the dark.

It’s been twelve, thirteen, fourteen years since then, since coming out seemed like the biggest thing in the world I could do. It no longer feels that way. I’ll keep doing it, but what I’m going to do next — after organizing a major sex worker day of action in San Francisco, hos first — is make sure that I bring a few people to EqualityCamp, which is on January 3rd and will be a chance for all of us overly-internet-ed activists to put our heads together and figure out what to do next, now that history has handed us what we didn’t do to hold onto the right to marry, that a lot of us would never exercise anyway.

I’m never getting married, I’m sure, but I’m going. Because I don’t ever want another campaign for “my rights” run without people I love in the middle of it. Because those of us who haven’t been in the middle of these ornate political sideshows have been doing hard work that has made us ready for it, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Because there’s a lot of us who’ve been off being queer in a way that the Human Rights Campaign and their brethren will never notice, never call to the middle, never give a seat at the table. Because we’re queerdos: we spend too much time thinking about all this gay stuff, and honestly, too much time online. I’ve seen you on Twitter. You can’t hide.

The biggest opposition to Prop K isn’t anti-prostitution feminist groups. It’s “neighborhood associations.” Unlike even the most socially conservative feminists, they never say, I don’t want sex workers to be raped. They say, I don’t want to see sex workers. Don’t want to see them on their front steps. Don’t want to see their clients or “pimps.” Don’t want to see condoms, or syringes. In short: don’t want to see poverty, don’t want to see poor people.

What these groups do, when pushing this image of the mini-skirted tranny with a needle in her arm, seducing the children from their front steps, is to make sex workers seem so alien, so less-than, that jailing them can sound like a step up. I say this not as an expert personally on living and working as a street-based sex worker; I’ve been privileged in my choice of venue and clients as a sex worker. It’s that I’ve been even more privileged to work with community-based organizations in San Francisco that serve the needs of street-based sex workers, including those who use drugs and lack stable housing.

The reality is, street-based sex work makes up the minority of prostitution in San Francisco. For every girl you see working the Polk, there’s a half dozen sharing one of those 500 square foot studio apartments up and down the Lower Nob to give “sensual massages” or to provide “companionship.” Indoor prostitution, where sex workers find clients not through street solicitation but through print and online ads, is the rule, and street work is the exception. Even street workers have sex indoors.

What I did learn from working in the sex trade is that the very people who can most likely afford to hire a sex worker are in the same socioeconomic demographic that rallies against the rights of sex workers. Where are these roving hordes of hookers they rave about? How can you tell that condom or syringe on your doorstep came from a working girl or boy, or from a careless slutty hipster?

What K opponents will never say in public, is that it’s not prostitutes that are hard to live next to — it’s poverty. And when I hear even liberal San Franciscans claim sex workers are making San Francisco “unsafe” for them, I never hear them propose what to do to ensure the safety of sex workers.

A Yes vote on Prop K will not make San Francisco a “safe haven” for pimps. The number one function of a pimp isn’t to get sex workers clients; it’s to keep the cops and others who would prey on a prostitute’s vulnerability at bay. The criminalization of sex work is part of what gives pimps a job. Pimps are not sex workers, and no one would call them that; and in fact, much of sex work takes place without the intervention or control of pimps and managers.

A Yes vote on Prop K will not create an “unregulated” industry where sex workers are in more danger than they already face. Remember: the only publicly-funded body regulating the sex trade right now is law enforcement. In a City where 1 in 7 sex workers say that police have forced them to have sex with them to avoid arrest, cops have as much to gain from criminalization as pimps do. Those who should take the lead in regulating the sex industry — sex workers and social service professionals — cannot when they must compete with cops. San Francisco’s Director of STD Control & Prevention supports Prop K for this reason: if cops are using condoms against sex workers as evidence of intention to commit a crime, how does that keep anyone in San Francisco safe?

A Yes vote on Prop K is a vote for human rights. For the last thirty years, regional, national, and international networks of sex workers and sex worker advocacy organizations have been fighting to protect the civil rights of sex workers. This summer, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon joined sex workers in calling for the end to laws that discriminate against us by making us criminals. Prop K is just one step towards achieving that goal. If you believe your property values are inconsistent with the human rights of your fellow and sister citizens, there’s probably nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. If you’d like to stand for a San Francisco where our most vulnerable citizens are as safe as you are, too, behind your closed doors, then vote Yes on K.

That blog about sex I started almost three years ago? The one that just won’t go off and die decently? I’m trying to commit my first waking hour of the day to writing there — like anyone needs me to email them right at eight o’clock. Which also means I’m likely to be punchy. I’m writing as if a major gossip publisher were breathing down my cold little neck, egging me on in a chatroom to make it short, sharp, and right. Besides, there’s room in writing about sex to do some reporting on the business of sex itself. I’ve already covered the sex industry proper. Now’s time to cover the publishing and marketing side of selling not just the good but the crap about sex. And why it’s broken. I promise it won’t be boring. If it is, well, there’s always sites you can wank to when considering the rest of your morning needs.

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.