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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”). |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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: |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
“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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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”. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
And don’t speak to me about radical sexual preferences if you claim to care about intersectional struggle and search “BDSM gang bang” on a tube site of stolen content, which directly hurts workers, and which runs on a taxonomy of reductive tags. A survey conducted by Pornhub and Mic.com aiming to review the porn choices of millennials (of course) found that “‘ebony’ and ‘black’ were among the top 12” of their favorite search terms. Mic’s hot take was that the youths were, happily, not privileging white bodies. But as I wrote for The Nation at the time: there’s an inherent limitation to the progressiveness of such a porn landscape if bodies are primarily sought, categorized, and thus sexualized via their race. Especially when production companies still put a premium —with payscales and exclusivity agreements—on “interracial” scenes (almost always a white woman and a black man), inscribing racism through the notion of taboo into the back end of the business. |
There’s an App for That In a dismissive and cursory essay titled “Your Sex Is Not Radical,” writer and activist Yasmin Nair rejects the relevance of sexual practices in political organizing. I agree with her when she asserts, “the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.” But her totalizing view separating politics from sex fails to consider the representation of sex and its role in constructing the truth of sex today. |
We must recognize that the pearl-clutching anti-sex work moralists who fear that porn is warping kids’ minds have a point. Online porn plays a powerful formative role in our lives, especially the millennials among us, informing notions of what sex gets to be. Given this fact, the need for political and ethical work towards a world of porn with better taxonomies and worker protections is obvious. My ex saw political heroes in his favorite porn stars, which would be fine, if he had thought of them as workers first. There is no escaping economics. |
It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the picture I’ve painted, that my relationship with this man ended in violent catastrophe. I grew to hate him for many reasons, but not before I had spent months, which bled into years, rethinking my approach to sexual desire. It was a revaluation of values and assumptions about what I want, for which I’ll always be grateful and in which I continue to engage to this day. In the years since we parted ways, I’ve had far more of the sex he would have deemed “radical” than I ever did with him. Some of it was transformative, some hot, some of it love, some boring and irritating—none of it revolutionary. |
Technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki makes the point that traditional political movement tactics have gotten easier over the years, “partly thanks to technology”: A single Facebook post can help launch a large march! Online tools make it easier to coordinate phone calls, and even automate them. Legislators have figured this out; they are less likely to be spooked just by marches or phone calls (though those are good to do: their absence signals weakness). |
Her point is that tactics which once signalled “underlying strength” no longer do, by virtue of the ease of re-iterability; the threat is neutralized and the ruling order knows it. The same might be said of sexual practices which once were considered threats to capital’s reproduction through the family form and property relations. Technocapital soothes the status quo: there can be polyamorous configurations with BDSM dungeons in the basement, but the houses are owned. |
To be blunt: when there’s a popular app for organizing your next queer orgy, how rupturous of our political status quo can the mere fact of such an orgy be? To be honest: that’s not totally a rhetorical question. As soon as the internet appeared in American homes, parents began to worry that their children were using it to masturbate. They were right. We were. To a child approaching adolescence in the mid-1990s, the internet was the perfect stone against which to sharpen one’s sexuality. Offline looked meager by comparison. You could steal a smut mag from a corner store, or locate your friend’s father’s stash of old porn tapes—and these were fun, for sure—but when it came to sheer sexual intensity, nothing could compete with the internet. |
One night, I came across a naked photograph of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine on Seinfeld. It must’ve taken fifteen minutes to load: one painstaking row of pixels at a time, 28.8 kilobits per second. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had never posed nude, so the photograph was a fake: some meticulous pervert somewhere had spent hours using software to fasten her head onto a naked body, the skin an unearthly shade of orange, the breasts cartoonishly big. It was kind of gruesome, but I found it intensely erotic. I was a devoted Seinfeld fan, but had never thought of Elaine sexually. After that photograph, I couldn’t think of her any other way. It would be the first of many perversions implanted in my mind by the internet. |
Fifteen-odd years before I found naked Elaine, the writer George W. S. Trow published an essay in The New Yorker called “Within the Context of No-Context.” It filled nearly the entire November 17, 1980 issue, and later appeared as a book. Trow was a strange figure: a high-WASP product of Greenwich, Exeter, and Harvard who got weird in the bohemian paradise of 1960s and 1970s New York, and had the good fortune to join The New Yorker at a time when it indulged, even celebrated, weirdness. |
One of Trow’s obsessions was television. The world created by television, he wrote, had formed two “grids”: the “grid of one” and “the grid of two hundred million.” The grid of one was the single human, alone in her room—“intimate life.” The grid of two hundred million was the entire country—“national life,” or rather, “a shimmer of national life,” produced by television. The distance between these two grids, Trow said, was very large. So people split their lives between them. They lived both as one and as two hundred million—as both a solitary individual and as a cog in the enormous collective hallucination induced by mass media. |
Celebrities were the exception, explained Trow. “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million,” he wrote. This was what made them extraordinary: they fused the grids. They lived their intimate lives, but on a national stage. “Of all Americans, only they are complete.” The internet annihilated the distance between Trow’s two grids. It closed the gap between the intimate and the collective, the solitary and the mass. It made us all celebrities—and not only in the typical sense of the term, in the way that Andy Warhol and Marshal McLuhan had foreseen a future where everyone could be a little bit famous, but as Trow understood the idea. It made us all complete. |
On the internet, media didn’t feel mediated. It felt like a spontaneous collaboration, a game of improv. We could live in the grid of one and the grid of two hundred million. We could be alone and together at the same time. We could expose ourselves to total strangers, and have them expose themselves to us. |
My sexual imagination soon filled up with far weirder fare than could be harvested from the pages of a Penthouse. Elaine was only the beginning—before long, the internet had provided me with a very diverse portfolio of libidinal investments. In the middle of the night, I gazed into the cathode ray tube of our family’s enormous IBM, my fingers moving carefully to minimize the clack of the keyboard, my ears scanning for sounds of my parents stirring in the next room—this was where I discovered my sexuality. Goethe went to Italy; I went online. |
A Catalog of Kink Because he was a pain in the ass, Henry David Thoreau once argued that there’s no point in making it easier for people to talk to one another if they have nothing to talk about. In Walden, he wrote: We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. |
Yet somehow, people have always found plenty to say. And much of what they’ve said, using one technology or another, has been dirty. Indeed, as soon as humans build new tools for transmitting words, sounds, and images, they start using those tools to get each other off. From erotic daguerreotypes to Skinemax, “blue films” to phone sex, successive generations have shown extraordinary resourcefulness in unlocking the sexual potential of each new technology. |
The internet, however, marked a significant advance. It’s hard to imagine a more accommodating medium for human sexuality. Not only is it infinite in its form—its packets can carry anything that can be encoded as information, from text to video to VR—but it’s limitless in its content, since that content can so easily be created and circulated by users. This latter aspect has always been a defining feature of the internet, ever since its earliest incarnation as a military research network called ARPANET. In contrast to something like television, where a few people produce the content and the rest of us consume it, the internet is both produced and consumed by its users. It is, in a very real sense, a group effort. |