Fragments: Sex
When I was in high school, I heard all the stories about teenagers having sex. Oh, the horror! But I wondered, how are so many people getting away with all this sex?? Apparently a lot of them are doing it right in their own bedrooms! My parents didn’t work typical 9-5 jobs, so at least one of them was often around, and even if they weren’t, their schedules were so irregular that they could pop in at any moment. Sex in the house would be a foolish risk, and I had absolutely no clue what would happen if I was caught – but I was terrified to risk finding out. So in high school, for me, sex was in cars. (This was senior year of high school.) I became adept at searching the roads of Augusta for concealed areas. I always had at least three potential places up my sleeve. One time, parked at the top of a cul-de-sac where nothing was built yet, I am 99% sure it was a cop car that drove up and turned around. Surely they saw the car parked there, in the middle of the night. And they didn’t check it out? I still don’t understand. But I know I was lucky that night. As soon as I saw those headlights, I hopped down to the area under the dashboard on the passenger’s side, trying to cover myself with my retro 1970s green polyester shirt. The thought racing through my head was, “I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college.” But they turned around and left.
Senior year of high school was a tumultuous time – a mix of highs and lows from one end of the spectrum to the other – but there was nothing tumultuous about sex, not in a bad way, I mean. Everything about it felt right and I felt like I was being true to myself, freed somehow, even for just a little while.
I debated the politics of blowjobs with a friend. Ridiculously, it’s basically the same debate that occurs ever few months in the feminist blogosphere. He said he wouldn’t let a girl give him a blowjob, because that was degrading to her. I said, excuse me? Let? What is this “let” business? In that scenario, the woman is just as passive as if she’s “getting fucked” or similar language we use wherein the woman is the recipient of whatever the man does to her. I said, what if I want to do it? Are you saying I’m not able to make that decision? Because I find that pretty insulting. If I want to do it, how is it degrading?
I don’t remember his answer, I think he just muttered something. Years later he apparently still had odd ideas about sex, but that’s another story altogether.
We went to senior prom together and I heard later from a mutual friend that he said he “wonder[ed] if Amber is going to try anything.” Try anything! Ha! No, I did not “try anything” – because, I did not subscribe to the idea of sex as a game, where you have to pull one over on the other person, con them into having sex with you. I don’t know if ‘consent’ was part of my vocabulary at the time but I smelled bullshit when I saw the way sex was portrayed in media, pop culture, society, everywhere, and it didn’t jibe with common sense, to me.
The people at my private school were way more progressive about sex than the people at my public school. A few of us had this silly goal to get everyone laid before graduation. We knew it wouldn’t happen but it was a fun thing to talk about, at the time. It seems stupid looking back, but hey, we were 18.
This picture was taken in France, which is apropos to nothing, but it seems like a good choice for inclusion in this post:
Sex 2.0, v2 – success!
If you follow my tweets, you already know that Sex 2.0 was a blast. I’m going to do a proper recap post as soon as I get a free minute or thirty. In the meantime, here are some photos:
Sadly, scheduled keynote speaker Nikol Hasler fell ill days before the conference and was unable to attend. Melissa Gira stepped up, doing a This American Life-esque keynote with Dacia playing Ira Glass from the back of the room. I sure hope someone got audio and/or video.
MySpace-esque photo of me and Melissa. She knows how to sit like a lady while I clearly do not.
This is how the sex nerds get down.
(Shades of this photo [coincidentally, also in Washington]. It’s clear I value certain priorities in my friends.)
I’ll also be posting audio of the Revisiting Naked on the Internet panel, which I was on along with Melissa and Furry Girl, and Dacia moderating. It’ll be up as an episode of (un)ConCast whenever Rusty does his MacBook Pro magic on the audio file.
Also, I’ve been collecting links to other posts recapping Sex 2.0 in my del.icio.us.
Thanks, all, for a terrific weekend!
Panel at Sex 2.0: Revisiting Naked on the Internet
Two and a half years ago, Dacia interviewed me (and 79 other women) for her book Naked on the Internet. The book was published, according to Amazon, on May 9, 2007, which serendipitously makes Sex 2.0 the exact two-year anniversary of its release! (Not to mention Rusty’s and my fuckiversary, but that’s been addressed elsewhere.) During the 4:05-4:55 time slot this Saturday, Dacia is hosting a panel of women at Sex 2.0 who were interviewed for the book – me, Melissa Gira, and Furry Girl. (I don’t know if there will be any other late additions.) Here is the panel description:
Revisiting Naked on the Internet
My book Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In On Internet Sexploration was published by Seal Press in 2007. This session will include a panel with some of the women I interviewed for the book; we will discuss what has changed and stayed the same in past two years. Questions include: How has the sense of community in online sexual networks changed since 2007? How have new technologies, applications, and websites (like Tumblr and Twitter) shifted the ways we think about sex online? How have shifts in law enforcement like crackdowns on online prostitution, arrests of teens for making child porn, and the obscenity trials of pornographers affected sex online?
Panelists: Audacia Ray, Furry Girl, Melissa Gira & Amber Rhea
If you are coming to Sex 2.0, I hope you’ll join us at the panel! And hopefully there will be video and/or audio of it (I think Rusty and I can swing the audio portion, at least).
Thoughts on Sex 2.0 past, present, and future
I can hardly believe that Sex 2.0 is less than two weeks away. I’m looking forward to plotting and scheming – I mean, catching up – with farflung friends, some of whom I’ve known for years and some of whom I met for the first time IRL at last year’s Sex 2.0. I’m also excited to finally meet some of my other internet nerd-crushes; Monica Shores, Nikol Hasler, Sarah Dopp, Maria Diaz, just to name a few.
At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a few reservations. There’s a little ball of anxiety and worry that’s been hanging out in my chest for the past several weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to try to push it away and tell myself everything will work out just fine. But as the founder of Sex 2.0, and in the spirit of transparency with which it was created, I feel it’s important for me to share my concerns honestly and get feedback from the community.
(more…)
Quote of the day
After a few rounds of Comment FAIL on this post by Hugo Schwyzer, commenter ElleDee gives us a dose of Comment WIN:
I am very suspicious of people who go on and on about how horrible taking these pictures are because they could ruin a teen’s reputation or employment opportunities and such, because I think most don’t want teens to take erotic pictures of themselves, period, regardless of whether they are revealed in public or kept private as intended. And these people that see these pictures as a Bad Thing are so frequently the very sort that would think less of someone whose private pictures ended up in the public sphere. They are the reason why these pictures can ruin reputations to begin with! If everyone would just stop with the panty sniffing for 5 seconds and accept that everyone has a sexuality that is private, it would solve at least 80% of the problem.
Quote of the day
I hope Trinity won’t mind me quoting her entire post. ‘Cause it rocks.
Can somebody tell me…
…precisely who actually said “We’ll just all fuck our way to freedom?”
Because honestly, the first time I came across that phrase, it wasn’t a Sex Positive Ooh Sparkly Laughing Pornified Dumb Chick (tm) giggling.
It was Patrick Califia saying “I don’t believe we can fuck our way to freedom. But this is not what the discourse of sexual repression tells us. In that discourse, unbridled sexuality has enormous disruptive potential.”
In other words, it’s not us who said sex is liberation. It’s those who dislike sex-positivity who read “Fuck For Freedom”
…when what we said was “Fuck Off.”
Quote of the day
From the inimitable Carol Queen, writing at the new blog Carnal Nation:
Here’s the deal: Sex positivity means you acknowledge that sex is, or could be under the right circumstances, a positive, healthy force in anyone’s life… even if it isn’t right now. Those circumstances may not be the same for everyone (though some may be universal, like consent), but they include things like access to information, support, condoms (if relevant), a loving (or at least friendly) partner, healing from past negative sexual experiences like rape or abuse, privacy, enhanced self-esteem, etc. This list could be very long and, again, it won’t contain the same exact elements for everyone. This leads to the rest of what sex-positivity is, namely, the acknowledgment that not everyone’s sexuality, including sexual needs and desires, is the same, such that one person’s optimum, positive sexuality may not look anything like another person’s. That is, sex-positivity includes the acceptance of sexual diversity, and acknowledges that optimum sexual wellbeing for you might look different than it does for me.
So much yes
Women’s sexual needs are not a scientific mystery. Want to increase female libido? Put down the pharmaceuticals and free our minds with equal pay, affordable child care and equitable distribution of household responsibilities. Wondering why women gravitate toward sexually passive roles? The answer has far less to do with evolution than with the ways women are shamed for expressing aggressive desire and with the pervasive idea that women who pursue their own satisfaction are asking to be raped.
What this woman wants is an end to tired clichés dressed up as science and the beginning of a world in which women are treated as individuals, each of whom may or may not be turned on by intimacy, back-alley ravishment or any number of things; a world in which anyone wondering what a woman wants knows that the best thing to do is just ask her.
Found via Kimberlee Cline on Tumblr – then clicked through to find the comment was posted by Jaclyn Friedman! (of WAM! fame)
Small world of awesomeness.
Google’s No Fly List: Racism? A-OK! Sex education? Not so much.
Today I saw Tony Comstock Twittering about something he called the Google “No Fly List,” and sending tweets about who was and wasn’t on it. I was reading Twitter on my phone when I first saw his tweets, so I couldn’t visit his links and find out exactly what he was talking about until I got home tonight. He put up two posts about the issue today, and another one earlier this week.
Turns out this is the same issue I had read about on ErosBlog in September. Somehow it had fallen off my radar though. Tony’s blog posts and Twitter updates piqued my interest again, and naturally I was curious as to whether I was on “the list.”
Apparently, I am. Hey, it’s official: I’m objectionable!
It’s not as if there aren’t search results for “amber rhea” or even “amber rhe” – but Google is specifically filtering them out of it’s auto-suggest feature.
Obviously the next person I tried was Rusty. He’s there… interesting!
Of course you can still get to any search results for any search term if you type in the full term and hit Enter. But that’s not the point here. The point is, why blacklist some search terms and not others? I think we all know the answer to that. “Objectionable” is code for “sexual.”
As Tony points out, racism is apparently just fine by Google Suggest; start typing in “stormfront” and you get no shortage of suggestions.
So then I started thinking, well, this is all very interesting, but let’s try a few other things to see if it really is specifically targeting sexual content as objectionable – not those naughty searches for porn, but information about sex.
Sure enough – start typing “sex education,” and it’s crickets from Google Suggest:
Similarly, “sex work” draws a big blank:
And the only suggestions that do show up for “sex” are very telling:
What’s important? Sex and the City. What’s objectionable? Sex education.
Things like this that some people would argue are minor or not a big deal are very, very revealing. It really shows where our collective priorities are. White supremacy? Eh, who cares. Sex? Oh god no!!
Body image and my photo shoot
As most of you blog readers know by now, my present to myself on my 29th birthday was a professional pinup-esque photo shoot at an abandoned prison farm. Incidentally, this is how you spell awesome.
And it was a big step for me, particularly in the area of body acceptance.
In some ways, I don’t have body image hangups in the way it seems a lot of other women do. I don’t have a problem being naked in front of people, or fucking in front of people. A lot of anxiety I had about being uncoordinated and stupid-looking in my movements has gone away thanks to pole dancing. In the midst of all the names and insults that were thrown at me as a teenager, the one time that someone called me fat, I laughed in their face – and it wasn’t a self-defensive, “try to make it look like I’m not affected by your abuse” laugh. It was a genuine WTF laugh at the absurdity of the accusation. Of all the things I’ve believed myself to be – ugly, undesirable, freakish, repulsive – I’ve always known I’m not fat. (As if fat is such an awful thing to be anyway – but I don’t want to get off on a tangent.)
I’ve never felt terrible pressure to shave or anything like that. -Okay, well, I take that back. In 7th grade gym class, someone made fun of me for not shaving my legs yet. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me to shave my legs, but I went home and did it for the first time that night. That was more about wanting to be grown-up than anything else though. Anyway – I know the pressures are there, and they affect many women in a very real way. But for some reason it’s just never been much of an issue for me.
And yet, even now, when I’m nearly 30 (!), still in the back of my head there’s that little refrain: “ugly.” I’m the ugly girl. Not allowed to be sexual because it’s just unthinkable. Not good enough even for a mercy fuck.
One of the my first therapists, in high school, when I used to go to the psychology department at Augusta State so the students could have someone to practice on, talked about bad experiences being like a tape player on a loop, constantly playing in our heads. You have to recognize it, and then consciously stop the tape. And eventually it’ll stop playing altogether.
The progress I’ve made over the last 10+ years has been huge, but the tape isn’t completely silent yet.
The photo shoot helped.
-Now at this point in the post, I don’t know what else to say, because I know that no matter what, someone will want to claim posing for scantily-clad photos is something I’m doing just because I have no self-respect or want outside validation or some other bullshit. I’ve mentioned it before, but this line of “reasoning” has always baffled me. It really makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall, because that would be more productive. So many people just spout it and I don’t think many of them question it at all, they just accept it and repeat it. But why does nudity – women’s nudity, to be exact – equal lack of self-respect? Or fucking, too. I hated that as a teenager so, so much. No, maybe I’m fucking because I like to fuck. As Madonna said, “Don’t hang your shit on me.”
Look, maybe this’ll help. Here’s the thing I sent in for that book on why you became a feminist. Not sure what the rules are with stuff like this, if I’m not supposed to be posting it or something, but here you go:
I didn’t have one well-defined “click” moment that led me to feminism — more like a series of indignant realizations. It all began when I was around 15 or 16 years old and realized the way I felt about sex didn’t match up with the way other girls my age felt about it (or, at least, the way they said they felt about it). For example, a friend swore up and down to me that all she ever fantasized about was kissing, because anything else was “perverted.” Most girls at my high school were singing the praises of abstinence until marriage — even as more and more of them became pregnant. I wondered how it was that the glaring irony could be lost on them.
Opinions boys held about female sexuality didn’t match up with my internal experience, either. Everything was reductive and a big joke — the old slut/prude meme. At the time I wondered how it was possible that no one else saw how ridiculous this was, because to me it was so transparent — but infinitely frustrating, because everyone seemed to believe it.
I wasn’t yet ready to speak what I was feeling, but already I was being told that I was wrong, perverse, and even dangerous, somehow. So what I would write about for my essay is how feminism gave me the tools to break out of the narrow confines of acceptable sexuality that were presented to me.*
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. For me, it’s never been about approval from The Male Gaze or some shit. And as I’ll mention in an upcoming post I want to write about pole dancing, the salivating, entitled way many men react to my own self-empowerment makes me want to kick them in the head, because OH MY FUCKING HELL IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!! (Aside: this is why in addition to being called a silly sparkle-pony [included just for you, Jenny] sex-pozzie patriarchy-appeaser, I also get called a feminazi and a man-hating castrating dyke etc. So it goes.) Yet somehow people can’t swallow that. Why am I not believed to know myself when it’s about certain topics?
I want to ask people, which matters more: my intent, or your skewed interpretation? You’ve already drawn your conclusions, why should I even try to convince you otherwise? The words “objectifying” and “degrading” come up, and I just lose my shit.
A friend emailed me and said: “I am so incredibly proud and in awe of your photos. It’s just so refreshing (?) to see a regular woman take photos and not be self-conscious about it. I would never get photos like this taken because I’m so critical of the most insignificant things on my body. I know it took you a long time to get this place, but it’s just so awesome that you’re there!”
I’ve had the URLs of a few other posts hanging around in this draft; since I can’t find a seamless way to reference them or work them in, I’ll just quote and let you make your own connections.
From Caroline’s post How to view smut:
But if you want to say she’s degraded because she’s clearly up for sex, she’s leaning as if ready to be penetrated from behind and you can see her cunt, well go for it. Just don’t expect me to agree, yeah?
From Tara’s post The F word:
When I started going to college was when I really realized how lucky I was. Here was a world full of young girls wearing skimpy clothes and dieting and spending hours doing their hair and make up every day. For free.
I made friends with a girl who agonized over her virginity and swore that she had a problem with over eating. She was so skinny that if she had been a stripper she’d have been the kind that guys told to eat a sammich. One day she was all excited. She showed me a book with pictures of muscular naked woman. “This is what me and my sister look like!” she said. “I never knew there were other women who looked like us.”
“Um,” I said looking at the pictures, “that’s how most women look?”
Then I realized that the only naked women she’d ever seen were airbrushed in magazines. Probably all those other college girls, too. And every newbie 19 year old stripper who asks me a gazillion times a night if she’s too fat. Holy fuck, all these women are deprived of growing up knowing what normal people look like under their clothes, and then they look in magazines and think everyone looks like an airbrushed model. Y’all need to get your kids around some nekkid people.
From Trinity’s post Sexuality, Mental Health, and Ableism:
And that’s the thing. People can find the flaws in the classic Enlightenment theory of autonomy, of the definition of consent, etc. all they want. I’ve joined them in the past, and may again someday. But in terms of really helping people, here and now, to have healthier sex lives, such an exercise strikes me as intellectual masturbation a lot of the time. When sexual autonomy is itself a luxury, arguing about whether it was designed for straight white men really ought to take a backseat to protecting the rights of “the crazies,” here, to have and to want sex.
In a world where people deem one another unworthy of control over their own sexual destinies, the endless discussions of what motives are positive, are “okay,” etc. strikes me as more of the problem, not a bold new solution that cuts off the problem at the dark, twisted “root” we’ve finally exposed.
I was one of those who wasn’t allowed to be sexual. Other women experienced pressure to be sexual before they were ready or in a way that wasn’t comfortable for them – that is their reality. But one doesn’t trump or nullify the other.
The bottom line is, this photo shoot absolutely was a big step for me. I hate that the word “empowering” has come to be seen as an oft-mocked buzzword, but dammit, that’s what it was. Some people will never believe me, they’ll always assign me motives and psychiatric diagnoses based on what they think they know. Rationally, I know I shouldn’t concern myself with them. But it’s just so frustrating because these lines continue to be reinforced every day. Being openly sexual means you have low self-esteem and no self-respect. I don’t know in what universe this makes sense, but apparently it’s a universe where lots of people reside.
All I can say to people who would disbelieve me is: this is my reality, and you don’t get to tell me how to heal.
—
* With the photo shoot it’s not even necessarily about sexuality, but rather about bodies, even though I know I’m conflating the two all over the place. I mean, they are interrelated, so I guess it’s not too far off the mark to do some conflating; my body was unacceptable and therefore the thought of me being sexual was unacceptable.