Prompt: Sex, like computing, puts one body in a feedback loop with another. Each body sends signals to the other, and each modulates its actions accordingly. But with cybersex, which overlays the principles of computing onto sex, the feedback cues are configured by the interface’s materiality—a materiality itself configured by the surrounding economic system.

Response: Within the enabling constraints of the RTI Network, the cam worker cultivated an intimate, cybernetic relationship to the sensors distributed throughout the device, to the algorithms that rendered her movements visible and tangible, to the latency of the network that transmitted her commands, and to the body of the subject that she labored on. Her labor generated revenue for AEBN, by producing a simulated sexual experience for a paying customer. But the simulation, for all its attention to realism, omitted a crucial aspect of sex. If sex involves two people both giving and receiving sensation, the RTI Network imposed a different division of labor: the female worker gave the sensation, and the male customer received it. This reflected AEBN’s vision for the future of technologized sex, articulated most pointedly by EJ in HBO’s 2014 Sex/Now feature: We’re going to take sex over the internet into the future. Sex over the internet started with still images, then you could download a video clip. So what is the next thing? The next thing is being able to actually have sex over the internet[…]We’ve always said that on that day when a girl in Romania can reach out and touch your penis, that’s the beginning of something completely new.


Prompt: EJ expresses a variation on a familiar techno-utopian theme: networked digital technology will destroy the gap between bodies separated by geography, nationality, gender, class, and age. But this new proximity would come on very specific terms: the future will have arrived once the female can reach out to manipulate the male for his sexual pleasure, not for her own.

Response: Although the company promoted the device using scientifistic jargon that suggested a devotion to achieving some absolute standard of fidelity to the haptic real of sex, the RealTouch Interactive produced instead a particular, heterosexual male fantasy of female sexuality—one where the female body was reduced to particular configurations of effects on the male sex organ. AEBN’s promise to recreate the real through a computer simulation was betrayed by the hard-coded materiality of interface—by the machine’s inability to send sensations back from the male to the female he was supposedly having sex with. The simulation, bound up with patriarchal ideologies of sex work, only stretched so far: a girl in Romania could reach out and touch the male, but the technology ensured that she couldn’t feel what she touched.


Prompt: Reformatting Sex In the wake of the patent dispute that prompted AEBN to abandon the project, the RealTouch has enjoyed a curious afterlife. AEBN’s 2012 decision to strip the RealTouch of its Digital Rights Management opened up the device to user-generated content, spawning an active community that encodes videos using the OneTouch authoring platform. And a range of male-oriented toys similar to the RealTouch—such as the Vorze—have taken up its mission of synthesizing a cybersexual real by synchronizing visual, audio, and haptic data. Although AEBN shuttered the RTI Network in the fall of 2015, the age of internet-connected, remotely-controlled sex toys—playfully referred to as the Internet of Dildos—is only now beginning to take shape.

Response: Dystopians will fret that this new mode of intimacy dehumanizes and degrades, reading the embrace of computer-mediated sexual touch as yet another indicator of humanity’s descent into machinic enslavement. Techno-utopians and transhumanists, building on Howard Rheingold’s original vision of teledildonics as a technology of liberation, will insist that telepresent sex provides a safe, transformational, and empowering alternative to the real thing.  By freeing the self from the constraints imposed by its environment, and by removing whatever limits the physical body places on an individual’s ability to experience their preferred form of sexual pleasure, teledildonics—as Rheingold imagined it—promised to wipe away the old model of sexuality, replacing it with a revolutionary mode of technologically enhanced sex that would be blissfully free from all the messiness that bodies brought with them.


Prompt: One of the messiest bits of sexual contact between humans is its tendency to serve as a vector for the transmission of disease. It’s no accident that Rheingold’s proposal for a tool that would permit the sensations of real contact while shielding romantic partners from the deadly risks of skin-to-skin intercourse emerged in the Bay Area during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. With the computer acting as prophylactic shield, sex could be both pleasurable and disease-free.

Response: Propagated in the psychedelic pages of the magazines Mondo 2000 and Future Sex, this networked sex would also throw the conventional borders of the body into disarray. What if, Rheingold speculated, you could “map your genital effectors to your manual sensors” so that it would be possible to experience “direct genital contact by shaking hands”? Such reconfigurations held the potential to revolutionize everyday interpersonal interactions: “What will happen to social touching when nobody knows where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?” The transhumanist vision of sex, rejecting the binary opposition between humans and machines, embraces these creative augmentations and re-mixings of conventional intercourse, as it pushes for the further decoupling of sexual pleasure from procreation.


Prompt: Although the “portable telediddlers” of Rheingold’s fantastical imagination have yet to achieve the ubiquity he forecasted for them, this future has arrived in scattered fragments, slowly remaking the world in far more pedestrian ways than an earlier era of cyberpunks had hoped. The RealTouch—one of the most fully realized implementations of teledildonics—demonstrates the technology’s potential, while also highlighting problems with its development that were invisible to the generation of cyber-utopians who peered into the future through the tint of mirrorshades.

Response: Above all, the RealTouch represented the absorption of teledildonics into a system of capitalist exploitation and value-extraction. In spite of its technical sophistication, the device ultimately functioned as an economic machine—one that generated value for AEBN through the labor of the coders and cam workers tasked with producing the cybersexual real, while also expressing, in the configuration of the technology itself, a set of gendered power relations. Cutting through the marketing hype and moral panic, the RealTouch appears in retrospect neither dystopian nor utopian, but instead merely mundane and mechanistic—a one-way masturbation tool that required an immense amount of labor to engineer, enact, and sustain.


Prompt: This piece includes material from Chapter Five (“The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch”) of the author’s forthcoming book, entitled Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing *(University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Scrolling through pictures, swiping right or left on a touchscreen, effortless and nearly instant contact in the event of a match… these are the experiences that define contemporary computer dating. But computer dating has been around for far longer than Tinder, Grindr, or even the personal computer.

Response: The first computer dating systems looked something like this: Your preferences were written down, usually in questionnaire form. They were punched onto cards. You received a printout with addresses, so you could write to your matches. Or perhaps, if you were lucky, a phone number. No pictures, and no information about their preferences, were included.


Prompt: The standard history of computer dating claims that it was invented, like so many other things, at Harvard University. By young people, of course, who were definitely men and, it seems to go without saying, white. In the 1960s, a computer dating service called Operation Match appeared to take the world by storm. It began by matching up students at Harvard, and then quickly moved on to advertising and selling its services nationwide—much like OkCupid and Facebook (which began life as Facemash, a Hot or Not knockoff) did decades later.

Response: In popular lore, Operation Match and its founders created computer dating. This narrative gives the impression that it was young men like these, and their randy, envelope-pushing genius, that caused us to think seriously about the up-till-then preposterous idea of having sex with the help of cold, impersonal machines for the first time. As anybody who has ever seen a picture of an old vibrator in an early 20th century Sears Roebuck catalog knows, this was certainly not the case. But what many do not know is that the accepted history of computer dating is not true. Or, to put it more charitably: it’s a confection.


Prompt: The prevailing account of computer dating’s origins is the same kind of stylized informational portrait that you might put up on an online dating website. It hides a lot and only shows the things that you think people want to see. Brilliant young men of privileged backgrounds taking a risk by applying machines to a realm about as far away from cold, hard, technological logic as you could get—this makes for a good story, and one which we are primed to hear, because it plays to our cultural expectations. Yet the real story, warts and all, is much more interesting. And it helps us understand why computer dating is what it is today—why we love it, loathe it, need it, and fear it in nearly equal measure.

Response: No Meetcute In 1953 a young woman named Joan Ball stepped out of a mental hospital in England. Her mother had beaten her and ended up abandoning her—to say nothing of verbally and psychologically abusing her. When she ended up in the hospital, she found more of the same. In an era before mental illness was well-understood, and when young women were routinely incarcerated in mental hospitals for everything from sexual misbehavior to hysteria, many hospitals meant to serve the needs of the mentally ill were instead warehouses for people who—ill or not—had somehow stepped out of the bounds of social norms. Joan suffered physical abuse at the hands of her mother, who, it seems clear, was mentally ill herself. After struggling for years with a difficult home life, it was Joan’s eventual refusal to take further abuse that caused her mother to involuntarily commit her. Yet the hospital was so bad that once there, all she wanted was to go home. When she finally got out, however, there was no home for her to return to: she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home, and likely would not have wanted to go back even if they had agreed to take her.


Prompt: Joan left the hospital disoriented and disheartened. At nineteen, she felt like her life might be over before it started, forever marked by the stigma of having been involuntarily committed. Fortunately, a work-placement program run by the hospital helped her get a job, and though she couldn’t return home, her Aunt Maud and Uncle Ted took her in.

Response: The road ahead would not be easy. Always the class clown at school, Joan knew it was better to hide her insecurities and weaknesses than to ask for help. Joan could not read easily or write well, nor could she figure out numbers and arithmetic. She was smart but extremely dyslexic, at a time when dyslexia was mostly unknown—people called her stupid instead, if they had the chance. So Joan made sure they never did. Hiding her disability as she started work, Joan pulled herself up by her bootstraps, asking help from no one.


Prompt: In the 1950s and 1960s, the culture of Britain was bottled-up and buttoned-down. The so-called “swinging Sixties” notwithstanding, London was a conservative place where women were not allowed to wear trousers to work without causing a scandal. Miniskirts might be all right, but letting women wear men’s clothes or do men’s work—running a business, for instance, or rising into management—was still outside the realm of respectability, and usually outside the realm of possibility, for most women.

Response: This was why, after a few years working as a shop girl, Joan decided that she’d had enough. As a transitional move, she took a job at a “marriage bureau” (think non-computerized dating service) and, to her surprise, found that she had a great knack for pairing people up. A “people person” and quick study when it came to character, Joan found that when trying to make matches you didn’t ask people what they wanted in another person—you asked them what they didn’t want. The rest was negotiable. Within a few years, Joan decided to start her own marriage bureau.


Prompt: Across the pond, at about the same time, the United States was undergoing a sexual revolution of its own. And, like the British one, its results for women were uneven. Yes, they now had the freedom of the birth control pill and the sexual empowerment of the miniskirt. But in many ways, women were objects, not subjects, of this new sexual paradigm shift.

Response: Women’s bodies were even more likely to be represented as sex objects in advertisements or considered sex objects in their relationships. Suddenly, such behavior on the part of men was no longer considered boorish but in vogue and liberating. Hugh Hefner had made a career of acting like a boyish rake while being a full-grown man. Though some people were disgusted by this cultural turn, that disgust only fueled Hefner’s appeal in the eyes of young men looking to escape straight-laced suburbia and get what they thought the world owed them. This was the cultural message that many young men—and young women—were receiving from all sides. By the 1960s, Playboy was even on the shelves of the Harvard library.


Prompt: As Playboy arrived at Harvard, three undergraduates were hatching a plan to score women without all the hassle of getting to know them first. Jeff Tarr, Dave Crump, and Vaughan Morrill (along with a Cornell dropout named Doug Ginsberg) had come to the conclusion that college mixers were “a particular social evil”—awkward events that were half cocktail party, half dance, and often all disappointment. What could be done to short-circuit this painful process of meeting women? One way would’ve been to integrate Harvard’s undergraduate spaces. In the 1960s, Harvard remained an all-male institution, with Radcliffe College as its all-female counterpart. Harvard students and “Cliffies” took classes together, but women were banned from Harvard’s undergraduate library and its dormitories. Even the dining halls were restricted: women could only enter escorted, and only at certain times.

Response: But these three young Harvard men were opposed to integration. After all, that would just make the indignity of the coed mixer a daily occurrence. They needed to find another solution. Fake It ‘Til You Make It Despite being dyslexic, Joan Ball—like many smart people with disabilities—was extremely good at running a business. Her new marriage bureau flourished, even though the early 1960s was a difficult time for such an undertaking. So suspicious of sexual impropriety was “straight” society that most people assumed marriage bureaus were fronts for prostitution—companies that matched men and women for a fee sounded awfully suspect.


Prompt: For this reason, Joan had a devil of a time advertising her new endeavor. No respectable newspapers wanted to publish ads for this unseemly type of establishment. So Joan used her creativity and went one better than print media. The people likely to use her service would already be somewhat edgy, and somewhat marginalized, so why not meet them where they were? That was how, in the mid-1960s, her ads ended up sailing across the airwaves, over the water, and illegally coming into the United Kingdom.

Response: In the 1960s, all news media—and, by extension, entertainment—was regulated by the British government. In part an artifact of the war, and in part the historical result of a strong centralized government, media regulation restricted not just what was said on the BBC, but also what was sung and played. This meant no rock ‘n’ roll on the radio—or anything else that would be offensive to the (imagined) British public.


Prompt: So an enterprising group of young people decided to set up their own radio stations and play the music they wanted to hear. These illegal pirate radio stations operated in defiance of the BBC, which put them at risk of being shut down by the government. This was how they ended up on boats off the coast of the British Isles, broadcasting from international waters.

Response: The “pop pirates,” as they were called, transmitted from rickety ships that floated back and forth in the English Channel—sometimes just barely. Their weak signals (stronger at night due to lower interference) reached the radio sets of young and old Britons hungry for a new sound. The pirates’ broadcasts didn’t come for free, however. They needed funding to stay afloat—pun intended—and the best way to earn money was to advertise. And so they were more than happy to take Joan’s advertisements for a service that, if anything, matched their sensibilities and worldview.


Prompt: Advertising with the pop pirates made a business that could’ve seemed like a sad last resort for the lovelorn seem new, edgy, and exciting. Joan’s business began to grow. But before long, it became clear that bespoke matchups couldn’t keep pace with her growing customer base. She needed something else.

Response: False Firsts Back at Harvard, the young men were cooking up an idea for a business. Or rather, copying one. They had heard about computer dating systems in continental Europe. In a few Scandinavian countries, enterprising men and women with access to computers—often time-shared ones at local universities—had been arranging events where people were matched up according to their interests by computer, and then invited to a dance to meet their matches.


Prompt: What if they did the same, but nixed the dance? They called their venture “Operation Match.” All they had to do was find a computer, and in the era of time-sharing, this wasn’t hard. Mainframes were huge and expensive, but they operated on a pay-to-play model. Timesharing allowed people to buy time to run their programs on a computer that they never would have been able to afford otherwise. (Much like we use the cloud today to do things that would be impossible using only the limited computing infrastructure that we personally own.) The three young men could outsource the coding of the program, and then buy time on a mainframe to run it. (Interestingly, when interviewed years later, none of the Operation Match founders could recall the name of the freelance programmer they actually hired to write the program, and as a result, there is no way of telling how—or if—the program actually worked.) They would distribute questionnaires about romantic and social preferences to their fellow students, then hire a team of “secretaries” to transfer the information onto punch cards to input the data into the computer. Finally, they would use their program to match customers up with each other.

Response: Because it was Harvard, this seemed scampish and irrepressible rather than crude and sleazy. After all, if Harvard students were doing it, it must be smart—and it certainly couldn’t be disreputable. Their endeavor attracted publicity more because of who they were than because of what they were doing. The fledgling business got press not only from the campus newspaper and other local news sources—it also received free national advertising on CBS television, thanks to a fellow student’s family connection with the producer of the quiz show To Tell The Truth.


Prompt: But, to tell the truth, long before Operation Match ever ran its first match-up program, Joan Ball had come to the conclusion that computers were the way of the future in dating. And not because there were too few prospects, but because there were too many. She needed help bringing people together in a logical way, at a large scale, so that they could go off and do illogical things at a small scale. She needed to balance the personal and the impersonal, the rational and the romantic, in order to make it work. So she started asking people to write down what they didn’t want—this time in a more rigid format that could be quantified. The rest, after all, remained negotiable. Despite the idea that computer dating was somehow “revolutionary” or only for the young, it was divorcees, widowers, and older unmarried people who mostly answered her call.

Response: In 1964, Joan ran the first successful commercial computer dating match-up in either the UK or the US without all the fanfare later attached to Operation Match—but with more real-world success. Joan also took advantage of time-shared computer resources to run her program but, as in the case of Operation Match, the name of the programmer who coded it has been lost.


Prompt: Yet Joan created the program, in the sense that she designed it and determined the logical flow of how it worked. It would not focus on matching people up through their similarities, but rather according to what they did not want. In other words, her program took strong negative feelings into account first when determining matches.

Response: It seemed to work. In fact, Joan’s first run at computer dating was so commercially successful that she immediately changed the name of her business from the Eros Friendship Bureau to the St. James Computer Dating Service. The name change trumpeted the importance of computing to her service at a time when this sort of futuristic take on romantic match-ups could still well have been a business risk.


Prompt: By 1965, she had changed the name again to fully reflect her computer-centric model: Com-Pat, short for “computerized compatibility,” was born. Joan initially ran what she called the “Com-Pat I” program, the first iteration of the software. It was successful, but like any good systems analyst, she saw room for improvement. By 1970 “Com-Pat II” was using better data, a larger user pool, and incorporating what Ball had learned from tweaking version 1.0 over the course of several years.

Response: About a year after Ball began her computer dating service, Operation Match ran its first program to match up men and women. The many college students who applied, both at Harvard and at other universities, received letters with the names and contact information of all of their matches. But Operation Match was unsustainable. Even with the free national publicity they had gotten, the three undergrads had underestimated the amount of work, time, and trouble that the business would require.


Prompt: Getting women by computer was a lot harder than they had hoped. Soon it wasn’t fun anymore. As the shock value wore off, and Operation Match became just another business, its reason for existing—to find its founders dates—evaporated. It shut down after a few years, and the young men moved on to other pursuits more in line with their middle-class upbringings and their Harvard pedigrees.

Response: Before they closed Operation Match, however, a visitor from the UK heard about them. John Patterson had recently graduated from the University of London with a degree in mechanical engineering. Unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, he left England for America, and while visiting friends at Harvard, he learned about computer dating. It might’ve been Operation Match, or it might’ve been another computer dating service that had sprung into existence on campus at about the same time. Nevertheless, Patterson was hooked. He knew what he wanted to do now and he felt sure he could make a lot of money doing it.


Prompt: Sex Ex Machina The 1960s had been good for Joan Ball, but by the early 1970s, things started to fall apart. Ball was a working-class girl from hardscrabble East London, and lacked the safety net that her more affluent contemporaries enjoyed. With no one to bail her out in times of scarcity, little stood between success and disaster.

Response: The UK was in an increasingly grim economic situation. The pound had been devalued several times, and despite assurances from the government that the economy was on the mend, it didn’t feel that way to most workers or small-business owners. Wracked by national strikes and widespread discontent, the nation literally shut down for a time when coal miners’ work stoppages resulted in such a shortage of fuel that neither government nor industry could function.


Prompt: In the midst of this, Com-Pat’s telephone number got misprinted in the telephone directory, which severely damaged the business until the mistake could be corrected. Worse yet, one of the major newspapers that carried Com-Pat’s ads suddenly decided to change its advertising policy and drop them. So imagine Joan’s horrified surprise when she entered the London Tube one day to see ads for a computer dating service plastered on the train. A new company called Dateline had burst on the scene—and computer dating was about to change dramatically.

Response: John Patterson made a big splash with Dateline. He had several advantages: he both learned from his predecessors’ mistakes and benefited from their innovations. By the time Dateline came along, companies like Com-Pat had already softened the resistance of advertisers to the idea of computer dating and helped sell the public on the concept.


Prompt: Patterson wasted no time in using this cultural capital, immediately positioning his service as a kind of sex ex machina. While Com-Pat ran advertisements that promised people would meet their “true match,” Dateline ran ads that positioned their service as an “adventure.” Patterson’s questionnaires had more to do with sexual preferences and sexual compatibility than Compat’s personality-based approach.

Response: When he got flack, Patterson doubled down, creating another service that was even more sexually explicit in its questions. That service asked users how sexually experienced they required their partners to be, along with which specific sex acts customers had engaged in previously, and which ones they wished to perform in the future.


Prompt: Yet when asked for details on how his service worked, Patterson shrugged off the question. He told the London Times in 1972 that even if his clients had nothing else in common, at least they had in common the fact that they had all joined Dateline. But had they? In 1969 he was arrested and convicted of fraud and conspiracy for trying to sell a list of young women to men who were looking for prostitutes. Patterson assured the men that all of these women were “good to go.” Whether these women had signed up for his service, or whether he had simply collected their names out of the phone book, was unclear. What was clear was that the women did not know he was using their names in this fashion.

Response: Though Patterson was convicted and somewhat disgraced, this setback didn’t deter him. But it didn’t seem to teach him much, either. Throughout its existence, a veneer of sleaze plagued Dateline. Women customers often complained of being matched up with men they had nothing in common with, or whose questionnaire preferences were in direct opposition to theirs. This was ironic, considering how thorough Patterson’s questionnaire was—it asked people for information that would be “Big Brother’s Dream,” in the words of the Times of London. By contrast, Joan Ball’s more conservative and much shorter questionnaire seemed to result in better matches.


Prompt: Ball had continued to struggle as Britain became mired in the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Her business, which focused on a smaller, more curated pool of users than Patterson’s, became increasingly hard to sustain. Patterson was a shrewd businessman and a smart promoter, and Dateline grew by leaps and bounds after its initial troubles. Ball, meanwhile, was sidelined with both personal problems and debt. Soon, she wanted out.

Response: Ball and Patterson had met each other—they had been on television together and were always interviewed for the same newspaper stories about computer dating. Ball was Patterson’s only real competitor, and he knew her business was sound. So when Ball called Patterson one day in 1974 and offered him the opportunity to buy her business on the condition that he pay the £2000 of debt that Com-Pat had accrued as part of the deal, Patterson took a taxi across London in a flash to sign the papers.


Prompt: All’s Well That Ends From there, Ball went on to other pursuits and much self-reflection. Though she had run a business to make other people happy, she wasn’t very happy herself. Finally diagnosed late in life with dyslexia, she felt relieved to know her inability to write or to do math wasn’t a character flaw. Still, she felt as though she had spent her life hiding her shortcomings. She had been locked in an “emotional dungeon” of her own making, as she put it, even while she ran a business that helped other people escape theirs. Ever independent, and refusing to marry despite having long romantic relationships with men, Ball was the prototypical “new woman.” Unfortunately for her, she came on the scene about a decade before women like her were culturally accepted.

Response: Patterson, for his part, continued on to great success. To this day, Dateline is the longest-running computer dating service in the Anglo-American world. When Patterson died he was a millionaire many times over, and had been married several times. It was one of his ex-wives who found him in his bathtub, dead of complications related to alcoholism, in 1997 at the age of fifty-two.


Prompt: Good Ol’ Fashioned Computer Dating From Joan Ball to the Operation Match partners to John Patterson, the real story of computer dating is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The most successful computer dating entrepreneurs understood that their businesses entrenched existing norms rather than overturned them. Ball’s Com-Pat succeeded early on in large part because it did not push people outside of their comfort zone—it simply gave them what they wanted and expected in a more efficient way. Likewise, Patterson’s Dateline came on the scene at a time in the swinging Sixties and Seventies when people were already apt to be more adventurous—and open to accepting a higher level of risk in their dating lives.

Response: Mainframes made matches but they also made mincemeat of people’s hopes, in much the same way that apps and online dating sites do today. One 1960s-era computer dating service sent its own employees out on dates with women, and had the men propose to their unsuspecting marks, because the company’s business model did not require women to pay until after getting a marriage proposal. Within the past few years, OkCupid has admitted to experimenting on its users, matching them up randomly in order to see if the company’s algorithm actually worked any better than random pairings.


Prompt: Earlier computer dating companies were the subject of numerous complaints to the British fair trading practices bureau, as well as to American better business bureaus. Complainants, who were mostly women, reported that computer dating services did not work, or that they took their money without sending them out on dates, or that they intentionally matched up incompatible people just for profit. There were also, of course, more serious charges that involved physical and sexual assault. Technology is only ever as good as the social context that creates it—and sometimes it is much worse.

Response: The most revolutionary elements of dating technologies—like instantaneous online communication or millions-deep user pools—did not come until much later. But this mattered little since these innovations still masked socially regressive norms. Ball’s service explicitly did not match up people of different races or religions. Patterson’s service sometimes did, but only due to “glitches” in the software. It often provoked customer complaints. Today, computer dating is still mired in the social strictures that govern “real-life” dating—most online dating sites focus on matching like with like and many even collect homogeneous user groups (think eHarmony.com) to further ensure that outcome.


Prompt: In that sense, early computer dating has much in common with today’s technologies. The birth of computer dating didn’t demolish social conventions so much as it reinscribed them into a new technological order. Heteronormativity, sexism, racism, classism, and capitalism have played a much larger role in computer matchmaking’s  history than technological breakthroughs.

Response: The fact that these aspects of computer dating’s origins have been largely submerged says as much about what we want as about what the technology’s pioneers actually did. We see early computer dating as quaint, impossibly utopian, or revolutionary not because it was, but because we want it to be. Seeing it this way helps us maintain the fiction that technology, rather than law or government, is the most important factor in creating social change.


Prompt: Like our online matches, we want our history not to upset our expectations or our worldview. We want progress to be the result of discrete inventions, rather than the outcome of the messy process of trying to integrate the technical with the social. We wish computer dating would deliver on its promise to solve one of life’s great struggles. But as anyone who has ever shopped for companionship by computer knows, the truth always leads somewhere different than the fiction invited us to go.

Response: Knowing the real history of computerized dating helps us see that this messiness is nothing new: using a computer to solve loneliness was always fraught and complicated. Perhaps this makes us feel—as we sweatily swipe left on another face in the wee hours of the morning—that we aren’t so alone after all. We are not living through a disruption or witnessing a break from the past so much as we are participants in a longer techno-emotional history that existed before we were born and will continue after we are dead. Computer dating may seem new, but in fact it has been around, warts and all, for more than half a century now. It’s time we updated its profile a bit.


Prompt: “That’s right, little circles… That feels good. Don’t stop…” A sultry voice guides me as I make looping strokes on my MacBook Air Multi-Touch Trackpad with my fingertip, sending corresponding ripples across the lifesize vulva on the screen. I trace rings on the Trackpad and the voice coos, “Yeah, little circles around my clit. Mmmmmmm.” Risking carpal tunnel syndrome, I’ve spent hours stimulating virtual vulvas on OMGYes.com, a website that aims to “lift the veil on women’s sexual pleasure,” as explained on its landing page in elegant neutral shades. The company was founded in Berkeley by a pair of friends, a self-described straight man with a background in neuroscience and public health (Rob Perkins) and a lesbian artist (Lydia Daniller), who partnered with researchers at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute to design a sex-education platform “distilling the insights of over 2000 women, ages 18-95, into open, honest videos of everyday women sharing from experience—no blushing, no shame.” OMGYes wants to help women and their partners understand their bodies, what gives them pleasure, and how to get it—how to “make a good thing even better.” It launched in December 2015 with private funding, and it currently has 125,000 subscribers who pay $29.99 for a year’s unlimited access to the site.

Response: The debut “season” of OMGYes focuses on techniques of genital touch divided into twelve episodes. In a series of short videos, approachable, articulate, and racially diverse women describe their erotic preferences. Then, in a second set of videos, they demonstrate how they masturbate while narrating to the camera. Flattering mid-angle shots alternate with extreme close-ups. Each episode emphasizes a particular technique—“edging,” “hinting,” “signaling,” or “orbiting,” for example. These videos are followed by OMGYes’s killer app: eleven interactive screens displaying digitized recreations of individual women’s vulvas. The viewer uses the mouse to stroke, rub, and caress in specified patterns while coached by the voice of the woman whose nether regions he or she is manipulating.


Prompt: Although users receive real-time feedback, it’s all recorded content, not live-camming. And while the screens display the patterns of touch traced by the user’s mouse, they can’t offer true tactility or texture, which would tip the experience closer to realism. The feedback loop is limited to verbal commands and touch: all the other bodily cues used to communicate during sex are missing, although many of the women discuss body language in their videos. Still, OMGYes pointedly states that it uses 256-bit encryption: “We pride ourselves on not even storing any personal information of our users.” OMGYes is among the most high-profile of several female-centered “sextech” platforms whose mission is “demystifying” female sexuality. These include HappyPlayTime (“Making Female Masturbation Friendly”), PlsPlsMe (“A Sexy Game for Making Intimacy Fun”), O.school (“a shame-free platform for pleasure education, centering women and gender-diverse people”), and others in the works such as the Lioness vibrator (“empower[ing] women to learn about their own bodies and… break longstanding taboos around female sexuality”).

Response: OMGYes and its peers hope to enlighten their users about sexuality through “hands-on” virtual platforms. But in the case of OMGYes, that platform is web-only: there is no mobile app. This is the case for many sextech platforms, since Apple’s “Objectionable Content” code bans: Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” Who is to say which feelings—erotic, aesthetic, or emotional—are aroused in users who gaze between a pair of spread legs and attempt to please a virtual woman? Are erotic, aesthetic, and emotional feelings mutually exclusive? And where is the line between explicitly and suggestively sexual? These I-know-it-when-I see-it judgment calls by big tech companies are only one of many institutional obstacles facing sextech entrepreneurs. Others include the difficulties of attracting VC funding and advertisers—currently, OMGYes only advertises on Facebook—and convincing banks and credit card companies to process payments for a product that might be perceived as pornographic.


Prompt: Don’t Overthink It Despite the challenges, sextech has the potential to be big business. The VC fund 500 Startups estimates that it’s a $30.6 billion field—although what qualifies as sextech is up for debate. As Kate Bevan points out in Wired, “it’s unclear at what point sex toys and devices become sextech.” Indeed, OMGYes cofounder Perkins bristles at the term. He is keen to distinguish the site from porn and smart sex toys such as the We-Vibe (the vibrator company that recently reached a $3.75 million class action settlement with users over allegations of spying), and he considers other sextech ventures to be “separate from the real, vulnerable bedroom sex we each actually have and all the associated feelings and complexities.” One of the ways OMGYes tries to capture those “feelings and complexities” is through pop psychology and self-help lingo. Its episode on “Framing,” for example, tackles what D. H. Lawrence called “sex in the head”: an overly self-conscious approach to sex. “For many women,” OMGYes explains, “thinking about getting to orgasm can make it impossible to get one.” OMGYes takes its own advice: it never overthinks. There is a mood of gentle humor throughout. The women speak in tones that are slightly neurotic but always soothing. In the episode “Signaling,” one woman reminds us to keep things light: “This is not mathematics… It’s sexy time.” All of the advice is smoothed out, generalized, and conventional. There’s nothing kinky about any of it. The women talk about awkwardness around sex, but they are relentlessly upbeat. And they never broach the more serious reasons women might have sexual discomfort, such as assault, shame, or other kinds of trauma.

Response: Even the centerpiece of the OMGYes experience—the touchable interface—is distinctly unkinky. Perkins and Daniller decided that the “encounter” between OMGYes’s users and the site should feel like a friend sharing information rather than a dynamic between lovers. (“Aesthetic or emotional” versus “erotic” feelings, to borrow Apple’s distinction.) Moreover, the designers purposefully avoided narratives of gaming that are organized around a player striving to “score” or win. (The “mindful game” app La Petite Mort is an intriguing contrast, as its users touch abstract, pixelated vulvas to produce climaxes.) With OMGYes, there are no bells or whistles to indicate orgasm. Users know they’ve been successful when the woman sighs and the screen closes out.


Prompt: But the mechanics of the technology are undeniably impressive: after you get over the initial surprise and weirdness of being up close and personal with a stranger’s labia rendered in such high resolution that it verges on the uncanny valley, the interface is actually quite inviting. It took Perkins, Daniller, and their team years to get the touchable screens right. The pipeline involved an unusually intimate and trusting collaboration among engineers, photographers, and the women who are the stars of OMGYes. The interactive genital screens started as thousands of still photographs of women touching their vulvas in different ways. Then the women recorded audio feedback that was mapped to many possible touch inputs.

Response: So, for example, when a user accurately follows the motions that the woman suggests, they get a positive verbal response: “That feels good.” When the user is a bit off-base, an encouraging, constructive voice makes suggestions: “Try going slower.” (A helpful graphic pops up to show the direction and placement of the touch.) An erratic or aggressive touch elicits a sharper response: “Careful, too fast.” If the user persists—and it takes quite a bit of deliberate misconduct to get to that point—the woman’s voice eventually says, warily, “Okay,” and her hand descends to cover her genitals, and the screen closes out. It’s a surprising moment of consent education between a real user and a virtual presence, and a commendable feature in a platform that otherwise strives for an I’m-okay-you’re-okay vibe.


Prompt: The Unfinished Revolution OMGYes has been met with mostly positive press. Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, plugged OMGYes on Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop, praising it as a tool for “orgasm equality.” The actress Emma Watson enthusiastically told Gloria Steinem about OMGYes onstage at a talk in London. This year OMGYes is a finalist for two Webby awards, in both the “Health” and “Weird” categories. And The Times of London placed OMGYes at the forefront of “the next wave of an unfinished sexual revolution.” Unfinished? Sure, there’s the stubborn gender wage gap and the continued division of labor in which women still do most of the world’s unpaid work, but didn’t second-wave feminism already “lift the veil on women’s sexual pleasure”? Wasn’t that a cornerstone of 1970s consciousness raising, of women sharing books such as The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976), and Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation (1974) and Sex for One (1987)—all of which encouraged women to get to know their bodies and claim reproductive and erotic agency? If women’s sexuality and “the uses of the erotic as power” (as Audre Lorde put it in her essay by that title) were priorities in second-wave feminism, what happened? Why are the phrases that OMGYes uses on its site, such as the “the taboo around women’s pleasure” and “the complexity” of female sexuality, still resonant in 2017? Why is there even a market for sextech products such as OMGYes? Forty years after feminist sex education of the 1970s, the “problem” of women’s sexuality persists, apparently, but it has a new name: the “orgasm gap.” To be sure, ever since sexologists such as Masters and Johnson studied men and women’s orgasms, there has been a marked differential. Indiana University’s 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that 91 percent of men reported that they had an orgasm during their last sexual encounter, but only 64 percent of women could say the same. Elisabeth A. Lloyd’s study The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution concludes that a third of women never orgasm during intercourse. The picture becomes more telling once the data is broken down: lesbians do substantially better in the orgasm stakes than straight or bisexual women. Culture, more than nature, is at the root of the orgasm gap.

Response: But while the underlying asymmetry isn’t new, the phrase “orgasm gap”—which has been trending vigorously since 2011—implies that women’s sexual pleasure is a problem of economic scarcity and competition. Sociologist Paula England insists that the “orgasm gap is an inequity that’s as serious as the pay gap, and it’s producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry.” Whether or not that’s true, sextech and Big Pharma have both been eager to capitalize on the idea that women are in need of some serious orgasmic intervention.


Prompt: Why does female sexual pleasure continue to be framed as an enigma, a challenge, a gap, a “cipher,” as Annamarie Jagose has described the twentieth-century representation of orgasm in her book Orgasmology? Why, many decades after second-wave feminism, are women still contending with obstacles to sexual pleasure? Why are some still faking orgasms, contributing anonymous confessions about their troubled sexual history to the Tumblr page howtomakemecome, and seeking out sextech solutions? OMGYes explains it like this: “complexity gets confused for ‘unknowability,’” women’s sexuality hasn’t been sufficiently researched, pop culture spreads misinformation, “there’s no specific, reliable source of information,” and there isn’t yet a sufficient shared language about women’s sexuality. In keeping with its buoyant approach, OMGYes does not mention the orgasm gap statistics. It is also careful not to fetishize orgasm as the only goal—instead, orgasm is one possible event in a broader spectrum of sexual pleasures. And yet the business clearly benefits from the panic around the orgasm gap: despite OMGYes’s cheery tone, it is widespread anxiety about female sexual pleasure that draws users to the site.

Response: A Public Health Crisis Sextech capitalizes on the market opportunity created by the failure of two vital cultural forces—feminism and sex education—to harness technology. Second-wave feminism promoted the organic, the natural, and the bodily: the classic exploratory technique in the 1970s involved putting a hand mirror between one’s legs. The birth control pill and legalized abortion revolutionized sexual practices, but mainstream feminism did not make technology a central part of its own innovations until relatively recently. When Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto appeared in 1984, it was an academic novelty, far ahead of its time.


Prompt: Sextech may help fill the void left by second-wave feminism’s aversion to technology, but it’s careful to avoid the term. Sextech ventures typically do not advertise themselves as feminist or use the language of feminism in their mission statements. OMGYes steers clear of the word “feminism,” Perkins tells me, because it doesn’t want to “limit” its audience, which it claims is 50% women and 50% men. If those statistics are accurate, then OMGYes has attained a gender balance that neither pornography nor sex education have achieved.

Response: American sex education hasn’t kept pace with the technological savvy of the students it addresses. It continues to be taught in public schools through teacher-led face-to-face group conversations about the birds and the bees, usually with boys and girls separated. But sex ed is not only low-tech—it’s also astonishingly low-content. Only thirteen states require that curricula be medically accurate. While Obama had moved to defund abstinence-only programs, they remain firmly in place.


Prompt: The notion that sex might be fun barely registers: although UNESCO’s 2009 guidelines for sex education states that fifteen to eighteen-year old students should learn “key elements of sexual pleasure and responsibility,” recent surveys in the US, the UK, and Australia have demonstrated that students in those countries rarely emerge from sex ed with adequate guidance about sex as a practice of pleasure. Inevitably, lackluster sex education seems to have impacted women much more than men. The Guardian’s series “The Vagina Dispatches,” one of numerous recent demonstrations of the general public’s pitiful knowledge about women’s sexual anatomy, reported that “just half of women aged 26-35 were able to label the vagina accurately.” Given the pathetic state of sex education, the porn industry has become the default sex-ed provider, making full use of the digital resources neglected by the traditional sex-ed system. With its unprecedented level of accessibility, internet porn is a primary source—some say the primary source—of information about sex for audiences it was never meant to reach, including children and teens. Porn has essentially become a 24/7 X-rated MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Perhaps the most convincing contemporary critique of it is that it is distorting expectations about sex—some critics have even gone so far as to declare online porn a “public health crisis.” The adult entertainment industry has responded to the charge by initiating its own sex-ed modules. xHamster, for example, offers a sex education series called “The Box,” and Pornhub has launched a “Sexual Wellness Center” portal.

Response: Sextech ventures, for their part, are challenging the adult entertainment industry’s de facto monopoly on sex education—but they insist on distinguishing themselves from porn. One of the ways they do this is by brandishing data: sextech sites sport diagrams, graphs, and charts to lend their activities a semblance of scientific legitimacy. OMGYes’s “Orbiting” episode, for example, presents multiple infographics and identifies dozens of ways to circle—“tight orbits,” “searching with circles,” “off-center,” “occasional direct swipe,” “accenting on the clock,” “inward on the borders,” “tall ovals,” “widening ovals,” “soft-hard figure 8,” and so on—along with a grid breaking down the preferences of women in a study led by Indiana University sex researcher Debby Herbenick.


Prompt: By showing off scientific data and credentials, sextech tries to position itself in the health and wellness industry—while striving to make its offerings sexier than the typical sex-ed curriculum. Offline, OMGYes’s Rob Perkins refers to its offerings as “tutorials,” but the site itself uses the language of pop-culture television and podcasts: “seasons” and “episodes.” Herbenick makes a couple of cameos in videos buried in OMGYes’s “Research” section, but its foregrounded voices belong to the “everyday” women themselves, who speak from the same tentative place of curiosity and exploration that the company is trying to model for its users. There’s just enough science to provide credibility, but not too much to be oppressive: OMGYes aims for approachability above all.

Response: Reform or Revolution While OMGYes might seem to be selling Cosmo-style secrets of sex or groundbreaking data-driven discoveries about female anatomy, its main takeaways are actually quite simple. Women and their partners should get to know their bodies and learn how to communicate, verbally and physically, about desire. Communication doesn’t just mean talking, however, but figuring out what words mean: the OMGYes team told me that the first big discovery in their interviews with women was that “that feels good” means “don’t stop or change.” A pretty basic insight. “If there’s a ‘Jedi skill’ in the bedroom,” the OMGYes site reminds us, “it’s this ability to give and read feedback in real-time to constantly adjust and hone in on what feels best.” OMGYes is not the only sextech company making the unsurprising assertion that good communication skills are important in sex. It’s also the premise of PlsPlsMe (“Among all the findings, we found out that 1 out of 3 Americans wish it was easier to communicate their sexual desires, and more than 50% of adults wished society was more open to sexual exploration”) and Cindy Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn.tv (“It’s all about communication.”) This emphasis on communication comes straight out of second-wave feminism. In fact, most of sextech’s insights about female pleasure date back to the feminist explorers of sexuality in the 1970s. Second-wave feminists promoted “body education” by encouraging women to discover their anatomy through mirrors, masturbation, and grassroots information about arousal, birth control, and reproductive rights. They also urged women to discuss both their negative and positive feelings about their bodies and their sexuality. Our Bodies, Ourselves epitomized this approach. It originated as a pamphlet, “Women and Their Bodies,” published in 1970—when abortion was still illegal in the United States—that blamed society for estranging women from their sexuality. Dropping some Herbert Marcuse on their readers, the Boston Collective authors assert:


Prompt: Society has caused the alienation of a woman from her body… Our sexual experience is so privatized that we never find out that other women have the same problems we do. We come to accept not having orgasms as our natural condition. We remain ignorant about our own sexuality and chalk it up to our own inadequacies.

Response: While sextech ventures use snappier and less earnest language, they are working with the same legacy. As Ann Friedman observed in New York Magazine, “OMGYes is not a huge departure from the work of pioneering feminist sexologists like Betty Dodson”—only “the interface is more modern, the packaging more slick.” So in stroking virtual vulvas, am I an orgasm warrior storming the barricades under the banner of the sextech revolution? Is sextech a resurgence of feminism through “disrupting” orgasms? Not exactly. The modern interface and shrewd packaging aren’t the only differences between sextech and second-wave feminism—the politics are different too. Second-wave feminists didn’t just rage against women’s alienation from their bodies, they also clearly identified the culprits: capitalism, patriarchy, and the American legal and medical establishments.


Prompt: Sextech, by contrast, steers clear of this radical message. Some sextech looks radical, but it essentially rephrases watered-down feminist insights for a general audience, and musters new data in order to teach old-fashioned communication skills. At its best, sextech treats women’s sexuality not as a pathology requiring medication (e.g., the dismal “female Viagra” that hit the American market in 2015), but rather as a product of cultural conditioning and education. But sextech remains deeply individualist—it styles itself as neoliberal self-help rather than as an instrument of social transformation. And its ambitions are modest: OMGYes and other platforms aim at incremental sexual reform versus sexual revolution.

Response: As a counterpoint, it’s useful to consider one of the pioneers of sextech, and sexual revolution: Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s visionary, utopian, and at moments utterly barmy schemes were predicated on Marxist politics. Reich preached the power of sex and libido as a source of “bioenergy” in his work The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy (1927). His Sexual Revolution (1936) made the case that political-economic formations, whether authoritarian or capitalist, relied on sexual repression to keep people in line. The patriarchal family structure “dammed up” libidinal energy as a means of social control.


Prompt: Reich saw this orgasmic or “orgone” energy as a potentially revolutionary force. He consequently devised the “orgone energy accumulator” box, which was supposed to increase biopower, “potency,” and cure physical and psychological illness. The design of the orgone accumulator was crude: Reich’s blueprints call for the construction of a large pine box—a “collapsible cabinet”—lined with layers of steel and glass wool. While William S. Burroughs claimed to have experienced a spontaneous orgasm while in his orgone box, Reich expected its effects to be more mundane. He instructed users to do “daily, regular sittings” in the box for limited periods of time as sensations of warmth flowed through them—a bit like a charging station for an electric car.

Response: The orgone accumulator is laughable from an engineering point of view, but it was immense in its ambitions. If sextech ventures like OMGYes take a reformist approach, hoping to educate people about sexuality to produce better sexual outcomes, Reich called for full-scale revolution, using sexual energy to destroy capitalism. His endgame wasn’t merely the hedonistic pursuit of individual pleasure, but the dismantling of the entire traditional Western family structure, the patriarchal social order, and the conditions of capitalist production.


Prompt: Sextech, like porn, monetizes the orgasm. For Reich, however, the orgasm wasn’t a commodity—it was a weapon. It held the power to demolish the old world and build a new one in its place. It promised not only sexual liberation, but the liberation of humanity as a whole. Sextech doesn’t begin to approach the utopian intensity of Reichian revolution. But in the age of Trump, sexual reformism might be the best we can get. To give OMGYes and its sextech peers the benefit of the doubt, they are drawing attention to the pressing need for new modes of sex education. This is important work, especially as we enter a regressive political moment when the technologies and social movements that made sex for pleasure possible are under threat.

Response: Legalized abortion is at the top of Trump’s hit list. Non-discriminatory policies protecting LGTBQ people are also vulnerable. If sextech raises its ambitions to not only help users overcome the barriers to their bliss, but also get them to think about the conditions that created those barriers in the first place, and have a stake in perpetuating them, it may start to fulfill the promises in its mission statements. Then sextech’s “pleasure education” might live up to that very second-wave feminist slogan, the personal is political.


Prompt: In November 2016, the British tabloid The Daily Mail published some sensational news: escorts use the Internet just like the rest of us! The paper reported that sex workers had set up a website to rate their clients. With the air of breaking a scandal, journalist Dave Burke described sex workers “comparing notes on clients” and “getting advice on pricing” from each other.

Response: This information was far from new. The online forum in question, SAAFE, had been created by escorts for escorts in 2003. And as Burke himself admitted, SAAFE serves a purpose well beyond rating johns on a ten-point scale. SAAFE stands for Safety and Advice For Escorts, and members use it to share life-saving information about dangerous or unscrupulous clients.


Prompt: SAAFE provides women who work in a difficult, risk-laden profession a way to avoid men who do not behave appropriately. It is far less about rating the way a man’s breath smells or the size of his penis, and much more about alerting other workers to a client who stole the money back after a booking, or became violent, or ignored boundaries.

Response: But that might not sound quite so shocking to the readers of The Daily Mail. Unfortunately, a paper running a salacious story on sex workers and the internet is par for the course now. Just one month before The Daily Mail article, Carl Ferrer was arrested. You may not have heard of him, but sex workers across America have. He’s the CEO of the classified listings site Backpage.com, which used to be one of the country’s most popular online platforms for escort ads.


Prompt: In October 2016 he was arrested, along with the site’s founders, on a range of pimping charges. Ferrer and the founders were eventually cleared because the judge deemed they could not be held responsible for user-generated content. But Backpage still closed down its “adult” section, like Craigslist before it—a move the company called a “direct result of unconstitutional government censorship”. Predictably, the saga garnered sensationalized press coverage.

Response: When the media reports on online platforms like SAAFE and Backpage, it focuses on details designed to titillate an audience that knows little about sex work. It also typically tells the story from the perspective of clients. Only rarely do we hear from the sex workers themselves, who rely on these platforms for their livelihood and their safety.


Prompt: Selling sex online provides several advantages: a better opportunity to screen clients, a stronger ability to negotiate, and a lot more independence. Online marketplaces give workers the ability to craft ads on their own terms, clearly outlining their services, prices, and boundaries long before a client may even acquire their phone number. And taking payments online—especially through PayPal, where all that’s needed to send money is an email address—is both easy and safer for anyone who might want to avoid providing their bank account information.

Response: “Online advertising provides a level of safety to those in the sex industry that many other spaces do not,” explains Kate D’Adamo from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Centre. Not everyone can make use of these tools, of course. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein describes the kind of workers who have benefited most from online platforms as “overwhelmingly white, native-born and class-privileged women.” Still, for many sex workers, the impact of the internet is significant—and growing.


Prompt: Safe Words and Ugly Mugs Throughout its long history, the sex industry has always adapted to new tools and technologies. “All sexual commerce is technological,” explains Melissa Gira Grant in Playing the Whore (2014). Before the internet, sex workers placed their phone numbers alongside ads in the backpages of magazines and newspapers, or on “tart cards” they left in phone booths. Before the telephone, they carried business cards. In ancient Greece, Gira Grant says, sex workers scored the words “follow me” into the soles of their sandals so that customers could find them.

Response: And as far as they were able to, sex workers have always screened clients to filter out dangerous ones. “Ugly mugs,” “bad dates,” or “bad trick” lists were a fixture of the sex industry years before the internet became mainstream. The Prostitutes Collective in Victoria, Australia began their ugly mugs scheme in 1986, and the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes in Vancouver started their bad dates list in 1983. In a newsletter from 1995, an escort with the Sex Workers Alliance of Vancouver described how to produce an ugly mugs list: The format should display the details in a consistent order from report to report. Using a database facilitates this because the fields are in a consistent order in each of the records. The information should be as simple and concise as possible… The shorter and more concise the description of the assailant and incident, the more reports will fit on an issue… She also recommended using particular software—developing the database with Filemaker Pro 2.0, and publishing the list with Quark XPress. Even before sex workers had online platforms, they were using digital tools to protect themselves.


Prompt: The most important feature of these lists has always been that they’re produced and distributed by sex workers themselves. Community-based efforts led by sex workers are a pillar of professional safety—not least because the police often abuse sex workers, especially in those countries where prostitution is a crime.

Response: These efforts include not only ugly mugs lists, but a range of other methods for keeping one another safe. “Indoor” escorts—workers who are not street-based—often use a “buddy” or “safe call” system, where a third party—perhaps a friend, driver, or receptionist at an agency—will be briefed with the location and time of the booking, along with the client’s name and contact information. The buddy is told to expect a call just before the booking and just after, with a prearranged “safe word” that will be used by the worker to indicate that they feel unsafe—and a plan to go with it, or if they go AWOL.


Prompt: Workers also have strategies for evaluating clients beforehand. These include requesting the john’s full name and address to check against an ugly mugs list, or scheduling a phone call before the appointment, or requesting references from other workers. Feedback Loops The internet has made it easier for many sex workers to stay safe. While not all workers have access to online platforms, those who do can use them to implement safety protocols with greater speed, and on a far greater scale. Sex workers have always screened clients, negotiated terms, pooled information, and forged networks with other workers. On the internet, they’re able to do all of these things faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Response: One of the biggest advantages of online platforms is how they facilitate client ratings. Ratings are a core feature of the sharing economy, but they’re especially valuable for sex workers who are trying to protect themselves. If sex work were accepted as a form of labor, the idea of a ratings system might be less surprising. It would be as mundane as the feedback your Airbnb host writes after you’ve stayed at their apartment, or the star rating you’ve acquired from your Uber rides. When someone offers a professional service, especially one that involves being placed in an intimate situation with their customer, it makes the utmost sense that they would want to know from other service providers what that client was like.


Prompt: Ugly mugs lists served that purpose before the internet—and no doubt still do in some areas—but the digital age has strengthened the ability of sex workers to warn each other of abusive men. One example is Adultwork, an online marketplace for sexual services set apart from the likes of Backpage by being solely for “adult” providers. British dominatrix Margaret Corvid says that sourcing clients from Adultwork gives her more control over the screening process. On the site, workers build profiles describing the services they offer (and do not offer), detail their rates, and display a mixture of professional and candid photographs. Clients then message the workers they would like to meet.

Response: But the major benefit of Adultwork, London-based escort Violet tells me, is the “feedback” system. First and foremost, clients can tell other potential johns whether a worker is who she says she is—and whether she offers the service she says she does. Crucially, however, the rating system works both ways. If other sex workers have had negative experiences with a client, this will be immediately apparent to everyone else.


Prompt: According to Violet, Adultwork also once employed a “notes” system, where sex workers could leave details about a client that only other service providers could see. It avoided the risk of malicious retaliation from the client, who may have access to a worker’s personal information. After all, sex work is stressful enough.

Response: Violet has left her own notes on Adultwork in the past, including about a client who assaulted her. She explains: I think nobody wants to speak out about a client who has literally hundreds of positive reviews. But just one person coming forward can encourage others. My note reporting that client was the first, but within two days, someone else had left a report. It opened the floodgates. The online reporting system makes it feel a lot more legitimate. Without it, dangerous clients would just carry on getting away with it, which is what I found out when I reported this client and had other escorts messaging me saying, “Oh yeah, I remember meeting him, he did a similar thing to me.” Another valuable tool for online screening among British sex workers is National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a digital version of the ugly mugs lists produced by sex worker collectives. Run by the UK Network of Sex Worker Projects, NUM receives funding from the UK Home Office, a branch of the British government. It provides sex workers with a platform to report details of dangerous clients into an online database, which is then used to send alerts via email or SMS to all workers who signed up to receive them.


Prompt: Violet knows all too well the benefits of NUM, because she reported her assailant there too. “It took me about 6 months before I submitted the report and really came to terms with what had happened,” she explains. “I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to report it as a crime and go through the legal system. I didn’t feel like the police would understand—and even if I had gone down that route, that wouldn’t have made other sex workers aware.” Given that a lot of people still view rape and assault as merely occupational hazards of the sex industry, it’s not hard to see why sex workers would be anxious about reporting to the police. This is particularly true in countries that have criminalized sex work, where reporting an assault may result in an arrest for the worker. Schemes like NUM put control of the situation back into the hands of workers, and allow them to look out for each other.

Response: Thanks to developers at the Manchester-based “social enterprise” agency Reason Digital, NUM now exists as a smartphone app too. It uses the same geolocation technology as apps like Tinder to push local updates to workers. On Android devices, it even features the ability to screen calls by searching for the incoming number in the NUM database.


Prompt: The inspiration for the app came from Reason Digital co-founder Matt Haworth’s work with Manchester Action on Street Health, a sex worker support service. They keep an ugly mugs list, but it’s not updated fast enough—in the time it takes to produce a physical booklet, or even to push new information to their website, another worker might encounter the same violent client. The immediacy offered by an app could be the difference between life and death. As project manager Jo Dunning points out, “days lost cost lives”.

Response: Reason Digital worked closely with sex workers from the beginning to develop the app. That’s why the background of the app is black—to prevent the backlight from illuminating the worker’s face and betraying what they’re doing. It’s also why the phone’s location data does not feed back into a database—otherwise, the app could very easily be used to track the movements of sex workers throughout Britain. Users are at liberty to sign up with a fake name, and use a phone number or email address they’ve created exclusively for the service.


Prompt: One remaining hurdle is accessibility. The app requires a smartphone, and not all sex workers have access to one—especially street workers. During the pilot, Reason Digital handed out smartphones preloaded with the app. But for the NUM app to scale, a more robust solution is required. Either smartphones will need to become so cheap that all workers can afford them—and use them on the street without fear of having them stolen—or sex worker organizations and outreach services will have to distribute them en masse.

Response: Risk Management While building better tools for screening clients is critical, much of the challenge in keeping safe while sex-working is that so much is retroactive. The buddy system only alerts someone to the fact that something has gone awry after it has happened—which may be too late. By building a “panic button,” developers may be able to solicit a faster reaction. This idea inspired two medical students, Isabel Chen and Kyle Ragins, and sex worker advocate Vanessa Forro to create the Keep Safe Initiative in 2012. They set out to provide street-based sex workers in Vancouver with a pre-programmed device that used GPS and cellular technology to act as a panic button should they encounter danger. Given that many digital services for sex workers are naturally geared towards independent, indoor providers, Keep Safe Initiative’s emphasis on street-based workers was key.


Prompt: If technology can improve the safety of sex workers, it can also enhance the security and anonymity of their financial transactions. PayPal has been invaluable for sex workers from the beginning. Indeed, journalist Courtney Boyd Myers claims that when the company first got started in 2001, “some of its first customers were those working in the sex industry.” The appeal of PayPal for sex workers is obvious. Users can send and receive money through an e-mail address, and don’t have to compromise their privacy by providing bank details. Transacting online also hedges against certain risks. Sex workers regularly deal with the fear of having their fee stolen back from them by their client, or the concern that a client might waste their time by not paying. Prearranging payment through services like PayPal is an attractive alternative.

Response: But using PayPal for sex work isn’t without its challenges. The company has been known to freeze the accounts of any user believed to be receiving funds through sex work. And credit and debit card companies regularly block sites that may be used to facilitate sex work—as Backpage found out. The Great Normalizer Ever since Carol Leigh coined the term “sex worker” in the late 1970s, the fault lines of feminism have been drawn along supporting the criminalisation or decriminalisation of the sex industry. Those advocating criminalisation believe sex work is not work but abuse: Gloria Steinem branded it “commercialised rape.” They want the industry to be completely criminalised, as it is in America, or for the client to be criminalised, as it is in Sweden.


Prompt: Those arguing for decriminalisation, including many sex worker-led organizations worldwide, believe that any mode of criminalisation endangers workers and threatens their livelihoods. They say that sex work is work and should have the labor rights that come with it. The internet has contributed to this debate by making sex work look more like work. On the internet, sex is just another service for sale. The founder of Citylove.com, San Francisco’s first online adult directory, explained the phenomenon to the sociologist Bernstein back in 2001: The most important thing about the Internet is that it has hastened the acceptance of adult entertainers as competent people … you can’t ignore them, or pretend that everyone is just a gum-chewing, fishnet-wearing, miniskirted prostitute with big hair and sunglasses.

Response: We all saw that big-haired prostitute played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. It’s a stereotype that the internet has helped erode. “Online sexual commerce had shifted the boundaries of social space,” Bernstein writes, “blurring the differences between underworld figures and ‘respectable’ citizens.” Visiting the Citylove.com office, Bernstein describes its atmosphere as “no different than that of any other new and profitable Internet start-up company.” The internet has helped normalize sex work as work, in other words. It’s achieved this at least in part by making the sex industry more visible to outsiders. Sex worker visibility on the internet may inspire sensationalism in places like The Daily Mail, but it also offers an opportunity to promote awareness. Social media makes it easier for journalists to contact individual sex workers and their organizations when writing on the subject. Social media also empowers sex workers to forge alliances with other activist groups.


Prompt: Molly, a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University (SWOU), calls social media an “incredible tool in building connections between groups and sharing analysis.” Through the internet, groups that are not sex worker-focused—organizations opposing police violence or deportations, for example—can discover the advantages of working with sex worker organizations.

Response: Molly also believes that social media can be formative in developing sex work politics. By enabling sex workers to see how other workers encounter the same dangers that they do, the internet can cultivate a sense of collective identity. Online communities have helped sex worker rights organisations “blossom,” Molly says. “People are aware of how criminalisation harms them in a very personal sense,” she explains. “Once you plug into a sex worker community, you can more easily see the broader patterns; you can see how these harms that you’re experiencing are part of a structure.” That structure is made more apparent by technology—and those harms can often be mitigated by technology as well.


Prompt: But the additional exposure that the internet brings can also put sex workers at risk. Online platforms may provide workers with safety, convenience, and community, but they come with a danger: surveillance. In countries where sex work is criminalised, law enforcement will monitor a suspected worker’s online presence. In countries where only the client is criminalised, police will follow sex workers’ online movements in order to track down their law-breaking clients. In the United Kingdom, where sex work in itself is decriminalised, the authorities will use online surveillance to gather evidence against workers for the crime of brothel-keeping—which means simply that multiple workers work from the same building. “Rather than limit their patrol to the street,” writes Gira Grant, “vice cops search the Web for advertisements they believe offer sex for sale, contact the advertisers while posing as customers, arrange hotel meetings, and attempt to make an arrest.” In response, sex workers must go underground—even at a time when their industry has never been more public. Secret, invite-only groups on Facebook help keep conversations among sex workers away from prying eyes. There, workers exchange tips, discuss experiences, arrange meetups, and share information ranging from dodgy clients to which sex toy store offers discounts for industry professionals. On Twitter, there are glossy, client-facing accounts and anonymous, locked accounts—and a thriving support network in the DMs. Only word-of-mouth will lead you to these spaces—so unless you’re a sex worker, it’s more than likely you haven’t seen them.

Response: An escort named Suzie tells me that she uses forums like SAAFE, but that she finds the underground social media groups much more “cohesive.” “There’s something more intimate about belonging to a network of workers who are local to me and part of a wider community too,” she explains. Molly reiterates this point. “These are community spaces,” she says. “There’s generally someone awake if you need to reach out at 3am, you know?” These spaces offer emotional support for workers dealing with a range of issues, from handling sexual violence to managing dating and relationships. They also offer friendship. Suzie says before she joined a Facebook support group, she had no sex worker friends. Now, they’re the “virtual cornerstones of my support networks.” But as with everything in the sex industry, even these secret social media communities aren’t immune to surveillance. Facebook’s algorithms have a nasty habit of flagging up all kinds of information about your activity to your wider network of “friends,” and are fond of suggesting that you add the most random of your phone contacts. “Many people use the networks via their real name accounts,” Suzie explains. She doesn’t. “I’ve seen people get into tricky situations and come close to being outed.” Still, for many workers, the risk is evidently worth it for the support these spaces provide. Sex work can be a lonely job.


Prompt: No Shortcuts However transformative, technology has its limits. It can revolutionize many aspects of sex work, but it cannot sanitize the experience of providing sexual services for workers who physically share space with clients. Sex work by its very nature will always be high risk. And while projects like NUM are taking great steps towards digitizing sex worker safety methods, the criminal status of the industry means that developers are unlikely to lead the way. A lot of workers would rather not engage in behavior that could be traced back to them, like downloading apps to their phones. In the United States, the slightest bit of carelessness could lead to a criminal conviction. Even in places where sex work is less criminalized, it could result in unwanted police attention.

Response: Still, there’s no doubt that technology has played an empowering role in the lives of many sex workers. It’s given workers new tools for transacting, for building community, and for protecting one another. While the underlying practices aren’t new, the internet has enabled them to be implemented with unprecedented speed and scale.


Prompt: Sex workers today are simply doing what sex workers have always done, just with different tools. Taking those tools away doesn’t mean sex work disappears. It means sex workers go back to whatever it was they did before—only without the many advantages that technology can provide. If that seems preferable, you may not have their best interests at heart.

Response: I want to share a couple of personal anecdotes. I don’t mean them to be confessions in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term “confessional”—as the revelations of some Truth from the depths of myself or my experience. But these are sex stories (kinda), and Foucault noted that sex—what we talk about when we talk about sex—takes the privileged form of confession in our society.


Prompt: So perhaps I can’t, we can’t, talk about sex non-confessionally; it’s a discourse constructed on the idea of revelation. That’s how truths about sex, or anything, are built—in the false belief that they are “found.” That’s what these sex stories are about: the myth of revelatory sex, and the truths it produces.

Response: One is about a threesome I didn’t have, another is about certain porn that I don’t watch. They both involve an ex-partner whom I dated from my early-to-mid-twenties who believed in revolutionary sex to the point of ideology. These are cautionary tales in how easily invocations towards radical sexual practices—especially in the context of political movements—can be recuperated into patriarchal power structures, techno-capital, and the creation of more bourgeois desiring machines. And through them, I want to question what it means to talk about radical sex becoming recuperated at all.


Prompt: What, if anything, was radical in the first place? Queer As In “Fuck You” At a time when technology presents itself as playing a liberatory function with regard to the pluralization of sexual possibilities, it’s important to question the underlying idea that abundance, of partners and perversities, equals liberation. On the other hand, I don’t want to fall into a trap which denies the possibility of radical modes of sexually relating to each other just because seemingly “radical” sexual preferences and identities are easily accessible on the App Store or on a porn tube site. These are open questions, but they give lie to claims about the inherent radicality of certain sexual practices—a lie too often peddled by the bombastic men-children and self-satisfied sex-posi “adventurers” spanning from the far left to the Burning Man playa.

Response: This ex and I were together during Occupy and involved in New York’s fractured anarchist scene, which briefly held itself together with school-glue solidarity for a few heady months. We were non-monogamous but had hardly acted on it, aside from a couple of threesomes with other women, the sort of which I’ve had in numerous relationships with men without this ex’s radical posturing.


Prompt: He spoke a big game about queering. About challenging a social order organized by heteronormative and coupled forms. He saw a political imperative in pursuing polyamorous and queer constellations. In (what seemed to be) queer porn (more on this later) and in kink he saw revolutionary interventions. Sometimes he used “queer” to mean a political subjectivity that works to undo both hetero- and homo-normativities—queer-as-disruption, as opposed to gay-as-assimilation: “Not gay as in happy, queer as in ‘fuck you.’” Sometimes he used “queer” to describe any sexual interaction between non-straight, non-conventional-bodied or cis-gendered folks—“queer” as in a label you can use to identify yourself on an app designed for threesomes. Both meanings exist and they intersect—his problem was collapsing them together entirely. His problem was also alcohol.

Response: I too believe that a heteronormative social order which punishes desires, identities, and sexual practices outside of its narrow remit must be burned to the ground. Individuals and communities have fought and died, and still do, to be able to love and fuck without persecution. The work of queer pornographers to give these desires representation and recognition is crucial.


Prompt: And, of course, joining a movement to fight persecution is the very meaning of political subjectification. Times of political revolt have long been attended by claims about the revolutionary force of challenging traditional sexual prescriptions. And little wonder: sex is a discourse that plays a major role in shaping what kinds of selves get to exist and how they get to exist together. This is the stuff of politics.

Response: The problem with my ex’s position was modal. He viewed certain sex—certainly not all sex—as a necessary rite of passage, without which no appropriate radicalization was possible. His belief touched on the religious—a faith that certain sex acts between certain bodies carried a radically transformative quality a priori. For a man who claimed to be a Foucault scholar, it was a baffling assertion of normative moral facts. But we met when I was very young. He was twelve years my senior, and it took me some time to weed out the hypocrisy and dogmatism from what, if anything, was righteous, or even sexy.


Prompt: Terrains of Choice-making People say “the personal is political” a lot, and I think almost always in a reductive way. It doesn’t just mean that our individual “personal” issues—like our sexuality, our families, our fucking—are political negotiations. Is it even useful to call these “personal” issues? Aren’t impersonal issues also political? And if so, everything is political, so why use the word to delineate anything at all? Perhaps like this: The personal is political because personhood is political. Who gets to be a person and how? How are persons formed, categorized, and organized in and through relations with each other? These are determined by operations of power. The personal is not political because personal choices are necessarily political choices, but because the very terrain of what gets to be a choice and what types of persons get to be choosers—what types of persons get to be—are shaped by political power. The sort of political power that whispers through human histories of convention formation and maintenance, of hierarchy and adherence to it, of regimes of expertise, of oppression, of struggles and paradigm shifts.

Response: Remember how Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada chastises Anne Hathaway’s character, the naive assistant, for thinking she had agency when she’d chosen to buy a blue sweater? A Foucauldian point well made: capital didn’t make her choose and buy that color sweater, but it did overdetermine the conditions of possibility for any such purchase.


Prompt: And so it is with our sexual desires—we think we just have them, as if centuries of power operations had not determined not only our desiring tendencies, but the very terrain of what gets to be a choice or a chooser. The risk of a personal-is-political discourse that focuses on individual choice rather than terrains of choice-making is the development of a politics that finds its primary expression through, say, buying organic or downloading an app for non-monogamous fucking that allows you to define yourself as “pansexual.” Who you are is held stable, while your personal choices are deemed political. This is what I call neoliberal identity politics—another phrase used a lot these days, and almost always incorrectly.

Response: Sex Cops and Body Fascists So back to this ex. After one of the many days of vigorous street protest during Occupy’s heyday, a large group of anarchists were reviewing, recuperating, and relaxing in a Brooklyn loft space often used for such purposes. I had to leave reasonably early to wake up for a radio interview of some sort. My ex stayed late and ended up going home with another person (who then identified as female, but no longer does). And, as far as he explained it the following day, the assumption had been that I would join them in bed the next day.


Prompt: The particulars of our non-monogamy at that time (not all non-monogamies are the same) required that he inform me in advance of going home with another person. Since I had been asleep, this was not possible and his unopened texts could hardly be said to count. So that was a fuck-up on his part. And it’s a fuck-up particular to our technological moment: instant communication has never been so easy, producing at times a misleading presumption that we have communicated—or should have been able to communicate—information to an intended party simply by sending it. The speech acts fail, and digital enmeshment is curbed by the timeless human predicament of being asleep.

Response: This isn’t just an issue when communicating polyamorous plans—it’s a problem of an expectation being produced. Expectations of reception and response didn’t emerge with the invention of instant messaging. Centuries of waiting on tenterhooks for letters preceded this. But I think the assumption of instantaneousness produces an often incorrect feeling that the sender has successfully communicated. In this case, he had not.


Prompt: The far greater violation, by my lights, was his assumption that I would want to have sex with this person, and his acting on that assumption—he said this was the condition under which they went home together. Moreover, that I should want to have sex with this person because they were, as he put it, “queer and cool.” The arguments that followed didn’t focus on the problematics of him assuming my desires for me. They turned on the fulcrum of why my desires weren’t somehow better. I wasn’t attracted to this person, so my ex called me a body fascist. My ex might be right. My libidinal tastes fit firmly within conventional determinations of beauty. I could, and often do, look back on this story as an ur-example of a manarchist (as they are known) weaponizing the idea of radical sexual politics in order to police the desires of others to serve his own.

Response: And that’s all true. No one should be expected to fuck anyone. But this is complicated by the fact that sometimes our desires are worth questioning and challenging. Sometimes experimentation, while it should be conditional on consent, does require trying things we might not immediately desire in and of themselves, but as potential introductions to desiring differently. Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.


Prompt: But by treating sex as a political project of rupturing preconditioned desires, might we end up reducing each other to experimental objects for our own self-development? And more to the point, such an approach treats sex acts as techniques of self-construction, as if the simple meeting of certain bodies serves to subvert and reorganize desires. Maybe it can. Maybe I think there are more urgent political projects than having sex with people I don’t currently find attractive, but who share my political diagnoses. And what demarcates political sex from the sort of privileged play of Burning Man orgies? Post festum, does the world look that different? I knew this would get confessional.

Response: Queer Privilege In a skewering essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent policing… there are also spaces… where a generalized ideology of anti-normativity holds sway, queerness is a badge of honor, a marker of specialness, and a source of critical and moral authority: in short, a form of privilege.” FuckTheory’s contention with what he calls queer privilege is that such attitudes, and the deep irony of their basis in a misunderstanding of Foucault, are “grounded in the idea of a link between the normativity of an act and its ethical valence.” He puts it better than I ever could: [I]t’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing? The counterargument to queer privilege is not to retreat to the reactionary normativities that queerness, even privileged queerness, attempts to disrupt. No, the radical thing is not actually to be a straight couple and get married and make babies and reproduce oneself as the world produced you. It’s not actually more radical to be monogamous just because everyone and their paramorous triad is meeting in an expensive bar in Williamsburg and revelling in their radical performance. Such a counter-reaction would merely repeat the problem of inherently linking the normativity or abundance of a given act with its ethical weight.


Prompt: It’s a problem well put by queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem in his once-banned text, The Screw Ball Asses. “Will any desire, apart from obedience, ever be able to structure itself otherwise than as transgression or counter-transgression?” he wrote in 1973, adding, “Limiting oneself to a sexual path, under the pretext that it is one’s desire and that it corresponds to a political opportunity for deviance, strengthens the bi-polarization of the ideology of desire that has been forged by the bourgeoisie.” Hocquenghem didn’t need to live in the time of Grindr, Tinder, Bumble, or Feeld to know that, “There is no escaping economics… Roles are not broken but granted.” The irony: the ex gave me that book.

Response: Which brings me to my second anecdote, which is more of a string of instances. This same ex used to watch a decent amount of porn. We’d watch together, but more often to discuss it than to get off with each other. His perversions were not mine. And, yes, his tastes were more queer. And he would find his tastes represented— this is a good thing. But his means of viewing were, as with the majority of porn viewers, through a set of reductive search categories on behemoth tube sites like  YouPorn, Pornhub, and RedTube, all of which are owned by one monopolizing content delivery giant, MindGeek.


Prompt: It was not his fault per se that tube sites rely on a grim taxonomy of racist, sexist, transphobic, ageist, and ableist tropes: big black, Asian teen, thug, schoolgirl, MILF, shemale, and so on. It was just a telling dissonance: he would praise the radical content, whilst using the very tube sites that have decimated the porn industry, reinforced its archaic categories, and undermined workers’ rights.

Response: Some years later, I became friendly with some of the actors and directors whose content would sometimes pop up (stolen) as a tube site click in the ex’s searches. I have written about their efforts to challenge porn’s problematic search tags as well as their Homeric and often thwarted attempts to improve working conditions. And while porn workers in the straight and queer sides of the industry challenge the means of their industry’s production and its conservative business model, the mere abundance of transgressive content is misread as revolutionary.


Prompt: Writing about porn in 2004, film theorist Linda Williams rightly noted that “as the proliferating discourses of sexuality take hold… there can no longer be any such thing as a fixed sexuality— male, female, or otherwise.” She wrote that “now there are proliferating sexualities, the very multiplicity of these pleasures and perversions inevitably works against the older idea of a single norm—the economy of the one—against which all else is measured.” And insofar as there is no longer one “single norm,” she had a point.

Response: But the multiplicity of represented pleasures and perversions has not ended the fact of “female, male, or otherwise” sexuality (by which I presume she meant gender). Proliferating perversions, as represented in categories of online viewing and participation, may have created a multitude of norms, but this has not meant a disruption in the hierarchical powers that control what gets to be represented as (a) sexuality.