Literate Perversions

The Shrinking Public Square

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As you may or may not know, I’m the co-founder of a web site called Sex in the Public Square. Although the name seems straightforward enough to me, it seems to perplex a lot of people. If you want to get a good idea of what we’re on about with the title of our site and why the concept of “the public square” is so important to us, go on over to Audacia Ray’s site, Waking Vixen. You should be doing that anyway, but if you haven’t been checking her out recently, she’s had some experiences lately that illustrate neatly the realities and risks of talking publicly about sex.

  • First of all, Dacia tried last month to open an account at Citibank for her business, Waking Vixen Productions. After filling out the preliminary paperwork, she received a voicemail delicately informing her that her line of business made them unable to take her account.
  • Then, early this month, she got a similar notice from iTunes, notifying her that her podcast, Live Girl Review, could no longer be included in their directory. ITunes was less direct than Citibank, saying only that podcasts could be excluded “for a variety of reasons.” On checking out their podcast spec sheet, she found “strong prevalence of sexual content”  included among the possible reasons that Apple can kick you to the curb.
  • And just last week, Google yanked her Google Checkout account, barely twenty-four hours after she’d put her new short film The Love Machine up for sale. According to the e-mail Google sent Dacia, “the products or services [she’s] selling on [her] website are considered ‘Restricted’ per our policy- Adult goods and services.”  [Read more…]

Sex Work Forum at SitPS: Day One

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SitPS Forum on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human Rights

Anthony Kennerson has gotten Sex in the Public Square’s weeklong forum on Sex Work, Trafficking and Human Rights off to a great start with a long, thoughtful post about men who patronize sex workers, whether through hiring prostitutes or looking at porn. I can see some people seeing it as an attempt to hijack the issues of sex workers and turn it into concern for the privileged, but I think that this is a very important issue to think about in terms of its effects on the welfare of the workers themselves as well as their clients.

Online Forum at Sex in the Public Square

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SitPS Forum on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human RightsNext week is going to be an exciting one, online and off. First of all, Tuesday is the kickoff for Cinekink 2008. Cinekink LogoCinekink is always good — far better than it has a right to be, in fact, given that sex often just gives indie filmmakers one reason to ramp their egos and pretensions up to eleven and beyond. I shudder to imagine what reams of crap Lisa Vandever has to comb through just to get quality programming for one week together. The GF always work the events as volunteers, and it’s a great time for anyone with a dirty mind and an artistic bent.

On a more personal level, though, we have a really important event of our own starting up at Sex in the Public Square. My partner and co-conspirator, Elizabeth Wood, is always looking for ways to come up with ways that we can take the pro-sex dialogue from spinning our wheels in the mud, and this time she came up with a brilliant one: rather than play the same old game of sex-work bingo with the cast of usual suspects, she’s assembled a bunch of the smartest activists and writers in the blogosphere today and invited them to participate in week-long online discussion on the themes of sex work, trafficking (and “trafficking”) and human rights. I’m all cranked up like a kid waiting for Santa Claus, except that in this case, Santa isn’t just my parents making shit up. It’s actually going to happen, and we’ve really got some great people who have committed to making it happen. There are so many things to say on these subjects, and so little of it ever gets said because we on the sex-poz side are busy just trying to hold ground from people who want to demonize us as haters of women, rapists, or just sling shit at us in childish ways by calling us “sex-poxes” or some other ridiculous thing. It’s going to be public, but that doesn’t mean it’s an open forum; comments are going to be strictly moderated, and people who want to play games like that don’t get to have their say this time around. That means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel once more by making the case that no, not all sex workers are victimized, trafficked, or acting out toxic scripts left over from childhood sexual abuse. Sex worker bingo is not allowed. I highly recommend everyone who’s interested check it out, especially if you want to contribute in a courteous, meaningful manner. Everything kicks off on Monday the 25th. The formal press release, complete with our contributor list, is below the fold.

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Review: “Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity” by Robert Jensen

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The following review was originally posted at Sex in the Public Square, the web community that I co-founded with Elizabeth Wood.

Getting Off:Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity Pornography and the End of Masculinity
Robert Jensen • South End Press
185 pages • $12.00

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfaction with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

It’s this last point where the differences between Jensen and I become too obvious to ignore; yes, I can go on for hours and hours about what irredeemable psychic flotsam the great mass of porn is, and could probably fill several volumes thicker than Jensen’s on the mediocrity, body fascism, poor production values, labor abuses and sexism that dominate mainstream porn. These are all things that people of good conscience should find troubling about porn as it exists today. And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.

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48 Hours to Go (SXSW)

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I posted before about the panel that Elizabeth Wood, my co-conspirator in Sex in the Public Square, and I are trying to organize a panel on the “Pink Ghetto” at SXSW in Austin this year. It’s about how we’re required to keep our sexualities walled off from all the other aspects of our lives — to speak publicly about what we do sexually beyond a leer or sly hints is considered a massive breach of manners and professionalism. At best, it can make your friends uncomfortable. At worst, it can get your ass fired — or never hired at all.

To get the go-ahead for the panel, we have to get it voted in, via SXSW’s online panel picker. Voting endeth tomorrow, September 21, at 11:59 pm. Please help us out by going to the site and doing some last-minute voting. And check out the other panels that I make note of in my original post, even if you’re not going.

Launch Successful

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Last Friday was a knockout for me. I’m still a little high from it.

The main project that I’ve been involved in for the last few months, which has taken even more time and energy away from this blog (but worth it), has been co-conspiring with Elizabeth Wood on expanding her personal blog into a full-blown web community called Sex in the Public Square. The purpose of Sex in the Public Square, briefly, is to provide a public space for intelligent discussion of sex. Both Elizabeth and I are big believers in the idea that talk about sex shouldn’t be locked behind closed doors. What we have now is an obsession with sex, mixed with a conviction that sex is a toxic thing, and our public world, at least, should be kept G-Rated. We want to see the day that we put that idea in the ground and bury it so deep that no one can ever imagine it existed.

What better way to celebrate the creation of a website devoted to keeping sex out of the closet than to throw yourselves a massive coming-out party? Well, that’s what we did. It was last Friday the 17th, at Rapture Café, a very queer and very cool new coffee house/bookstore/bar on Avenue A in the East Village. For those of you in NYC, I highly recommend that you check out Rapture.

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