A little while ago I picked up Audacia Ray's new book Naked On The Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration. I'd just started reading Waking Vixen when the book came out, and it seemed pretty relevant to some stuff I was trying to write at the time, so I ordered it on Amazon and arranged for the book to meet me in Southern California.
It's really hard, I think, to pitch a science or technology-focused book for a general audience without dumbing things down. Some pop science is absolutely grotesque, and some pop technology books are overly concerned with being pithy. Naked on the Internet is just right -- smart and insightful without lapsing overmuch into lingo that isn't understandable to a reasonably intelligent lay person. This makes it an easy and quick read, without being fluff. Combining a sex-positive outlook and a feminist sensibility, a framing that emphasizes women's empowerment with a realistic awareness that in our sexual culture men are still calling most of the shots, a refusal to facilely paint sex-workers as victims and other, this all requires a remarkable sensitivity to nuance, and Ray pulls it off without getting pedantic. (I wish I could do that.) She's accountable to the ways that her own experiences have shaped her point of view, without turning the book into an exercise in personal navel gazing. On the whole, the book required several different balancing acts from the author, and she actually managed to do it.
The book is a pretty broad survey of a lot of the sexual things that people (particularly women) are doing on the internets: online dating, sex blogging, self-made porn and cam sites, sex work, searching for information on sexual health, and teledildonics (which she calls cyberdildonics, but I'm sticking with the old term, myself). I was particularly inspired? fascinated? by the accounts of sex workers using online resources to keep themselves safe and to vet their customers. I wish there had been a chapter about virtual worlds (from MUDs and MOOs to Second Life) and a bit more than there was on sexy tech getting used in intimate, partnered situations. I wish the chapter on cyberdildonics didn't leave me with unanswered questions as to why non-sex-working women were so untinterested, or more precisely, some explanation that might suggest what would be appealing. (And that comment, truthfully, reflects my bias as a designer.) But on the whole, really interesting and smart. Really well balanced. Readable. I'm including some quotes below:
"Although cam sites market the idea that the man can tell a cam girl what to do - the customer, after all, is always right - the reality is that a performer can cut her client off and block him from contacting her again at any time during their session if he gets too pushy or demanding. The exchange of bang for buck is certainly more explicit on cam sites than it is on the paid-membership portions to lifecam sites, but women who do cam shows and women who have lifecams have something in common: Both have invited viewers into their realm, and they can rescind this invitation if they want to."
"Despite what I've written in this book about women creating their own online (and offline) spaces to experiment with sexuality, most sexual culture that's for sale is purchased and jerked off to by men."
"Cyberdildonics pares down the sexual experience to something very mechanical -- put tab A into slot B and vibrate -- and highlights some deeply ingrained and horribly unenlightened concepts of female sexuality; that women's bodies exist to be poked at, experimented with, and put on display as something that's part science and part fetish."