“I’m forty-one,” I answered.
“Whatever is going on with you at forty-one,” she said, “is going on with us.”
This is not to single out the Villages as a den of vice; it had enough trouble after a story concerning the rapid rise of STDs there appeared on the local news—a report some residents rolled their eyes at as “overblown.” Jolene Mullins says that the socialization in a place like the Villages might mean there are more sexual opportunities, but doesn’t discount that seniors who live in regular neighborhoods and congregate at community centers also find sexual partners. Still, she says “the reality is that in those communities you’ve got seven females for every male.”
Former Villages public relations director Bob Mervine has his own take. By and large, these are people “who grew up at a time when sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll were forbidden,” he explains. “Now those things are normal, everyday parts of their lives. They think they are in heaven. All the booze, all the sex in the world, and all the time to enjoy them.”
Two weeks later, in Broward County, I find myself in a very different kind of senior center, a single building, whose literature describes it as “an independent senior living community.” Instead of a lavish town square, I enter the subdued building, hushed and pleasant. I’ve arrived on a weekday afternoon for an HIV screening, which is a lot different than happy hour. It’s not quite unhappy hour either, though. There is ice cream.
Edid Gonzáles, outreach coordinator for Broward County’s SHIP program, says most of the seniors she tries to educate and offers to test for HIV think she’s giving them good information to pass on to their grandchildren. They don’t get right away that it’s for them.
Nine people file in and out of a community room while Gonzáles, bearing a bag full of black condoms (well, it’s almost Halloween) the size of a throw pillow, is here. No one thinks he or she needs the information, but almost everyone is attentive, supportive, talkative, and curious. They all ask questions, like why there is no vaccination program for HIV and whether the virus can be spread through saliva. Calvin Sprague, sixty-six, tells Edid, “I’m one-hundred percent behind what you’re doing.” One woman mentions that she saw a commercial that said the effect of “that pill” can last up to four hours. “In four hours,” she says, “you could screw the whole building.”
No one gets tested.
Gentle, soft-spoken Gonzáles tries to make one of these presentations every day in hopes of reaching more South Florida seniors. For those who believe “something else will kill me first,” Gonzáles’ colleague Jolene Mullins says, “The virus attacks the immune system and your immune system naturally breaks down with aging. If HIV is put on top of that, it naturally enhances the problems.” Then there is the challenge of seniors who have other serious illnesses, like diabetes, and must battle HIV on top of them. The complex interaction of medications is just one more risk for doctors to consider.
It all comes down to prevention. Jane Fowler has a special maxim she likes to use at her presentations that brings it all back to Bob Dole. Back when Dole was doing ads that said it took courage to talk to your doctor about erectile dysfunction, Fowler thought he should have advocated safety, too. She even offered a line: “Now, if you can get it up, cover it up.”
The Pink Ghetto (A Four-Part Series)
Lux Nightmare
and Melissa Gira
Lux Nightmare: Welcome to NSFW
At one of my offices (I have several), I cannot access Sexerati.
If I attempt to go to this site, I am presented with a spare white page that informs me that this site has been blocked for being “Adult/Sexually Explicit.”
The same filtering software blocks me from viewing a bunch of sex education sites: a vaguely inconvenient/ironic situation, given that I work as a sex educator.
When you work in sex—as a sex blogger, a sex educator, a pornographer, whatever—and you’re trying to promote both yourself and your work, you are pretty much guaranteed to come up against some very hard walls.
Ask your friends to subscribe to your RSS feed: they can’t have the word sex on their work computer. Ask your blogger friends to promote your project: they can’t, it’d fuck with the vibe they’re going for. Try to get advertisers, try to promote your work, try to sell things using Paypal:
You have now entered the Pink Ghetto.
I’ve been using the Internet to talk about sex, in one form or another, since I was eighteen: basically, since it was legal to do so. Most of my work online has been firmly confined in the Pink Ghetto: it’s the kind of stuff I can’t show to certain types of people, the kind of stuff that people erase from their browser history.
Even when it’s not porn, it’s sex: and sex alone is enough to earn the label NSFW—Not Safe for Work. Sex, even academic sex, is something we can’t always discuss in polite company. Trying to build your life, your career, around a discussion of sex means accepting that you will always have a fringe identity. That no matter how academic, how smart, how clean you keep it, you will always be on the edges of polite society. You will always be in the Pink Ghetto, and you will never be able to escape it.
Melissa Gira: Nowhere to Go But Slut
When thinking sex online, porn operates as the great dividing line. As those who work sex online, that’s the frame we’re issued—are you porn, or not porn? Explicit, or nonexplicit? Adult, or “family friendly”? Safe for work, or…? ’Whose work, really? What if writing, blogging, and thinking sex is your work?
Porn—making it, reviewing it, theorizing in best sellers about it—is only just one way to make a living thinking sex, yet porn is still the culture’s point of reference for sex. This framing of sex online as being either porn or not-porn doesn’t just come to us by way of the culture alone. Rather, it is enforced by the structure of our publishing and media industries, which themselves are, in turn, shaped by the culture’s attitudes toward sex. Anyone contributing to the sex culture by reflecting on, educating about, or otherwise talking sex is subject to answering for their work’s ability to arouse—and if it does arouse, how much can it still educate? Being smart about sex and being a sexual smarty-pants are still viewed as mutually exclusive positions, whether we’re talking sex academia, sex in publishing, or the sex entertainment industry.
What to do for those of us contributing to the sex culture with our words and pictures, no matter how naked we are or aren’t in them? Do we limit our work to abstraction and theory, talking only in the vague and general “you” of the culture as a way not only to seem more credible, but to shield ourselves from being viewed as sluts? Who would care about these things, after all, but sluts? Who would want to make a living from engaging the culture at large around sexuality? What kind of person can know so much about human sexuality and can still put a sentence together about it? Just as some people harbor suspicions about “the sex people” as their own form of defense and distancing, so that they don’t have to deal with the possibility of sex being just part of being, so, too, are we “sex people” asked to make apologies for our work if we want to “be accepted.”
So, in this context, I could say I’m only doing this—this sex thing on the Internet—to get somewhere else in my career, as a stepping stone to some supposedly elevated ground as a real writer, a real journalist, a real contributor to society. Sex is a commodity, that’s for sure, but it’s only really socially acceptable to traffic in temporarily. Where once upon a time, the story of sex for women was from virgin to whore, in the story of the business of sex writing, there’s the chance for all us soiled doves to reclaim our purity by renouncing sex, relegating sex to “that crazy thing” we wrote about to get our start, revising not just our resumes but our passions.
What if sex is where you want to go, not just your rent as you get there? (Hey, it’s been my rent, too, not knocking that for a millisecond.) What if sex is your work, not limited to prostitution or porn or what we think of as sex work, but as your medium? What is so less noble a
bout thinking sex rather than money, rather than politics, religion, or art? Sex being so fully embedded in the human experience, I want to put out there that there really is no way to engage the culture on “what really matters” without looking at sexuality.
Producing sexual media, theorizing, studying, and educating about sex are not some marginal activity, or at least, they should be thought of as such no longer. For those of us working sex, refusing to be ghettoized for our labors and loves doesn’t mean “rising up” from the gutter, but resisting the idea that sex is in some gutter at all.
Lux Nightmare: Where Everyone Knows (and Doesn’t Know) Your Name
When you’re trying to promote yourself—both online and off—it helps to develop a recognizable brand. As the Internet has grown, developed, and professionalized, it’s become common to see people making use of it to build a brand identity, and even more common for that brand to be one’s real name.
I’ve always been interested in using the Internet as a tool for building a brand: back when I ran a porn site I created accounts on every social networking site I could find, using the profiles to raise my visibility and promote my projects. I’ve done a great deal to put my name out there, to make my name synonymous with sex education, with smart dialogue about sex, with quality erotica. And I’ve done a pretty good job: in a lot of circles, Lux Nightmare creates an immediate association with all the things I want to stand for.
There’s just one catch.
My name isn’t really my name.
This is the problem of making a career in sex: as much as you want to promote yourself, put your name out there, become a recognizable figure; as much as you want everyone to know your name; there’s a certain fear that one day you’ll need to go “legit,” that one day having your real name easily associated with smut won’t be the best career move.
This is, again, the problem with doing work that lives in the Pink Ghetto.
I’m not ashamed of the work I do, or the work I’ve done. I’m not ashamed to have my image or voice or brand associated with smart work around sex. And I want to say that it’s just a short step away from associating this work with my real name.
But I’m a realist, and I know that putting my real name on work that’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from porn means getting myself blackballed (pinkballed?) from any kind of “legitimate” work. Doing porn under a pseudonym is not an act of shame, it’s an act of self-protection. Being out as someone who has worked in porn, someone who works on the fringe of sex advocacy and education, would ultimately jeopardize my safety, my sanity—not to mention the sex education work that I do out in the real world, under my real name.
It should be noted, of course, that there are people who do work around sex and do use their real names (Rachel Kramer Bussel, Tristan Taormino, and Jamye Waxman immediately spring to mind). But these people are often the exception to the rule and perhaps, most tellingly, these are often people who started their work as writers, edging into the Pink Ghetto after a professional reputation had already been established.
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Wendy Shalit about my involvement in porn. I told her that I had left the industry, moved on, largely because I couldn’t handle the weight of stigmatized work; couldn’t handle the ghettoized nature of what I was doing. And it’s true, and to a degree it still holds.
I would love to put my real name out there, to unite my “legitimate” work with my stigmatized work and tell the world that I’m proud of it all, that it’s all an important part of my fight for sexual literacy, for sexual knowledge and freedom and education. I would love to take a stand like that. But I can’t. There is too much to lose, too much at stake, and for now, it’s not a battle I’m prepared to fight.
With Stigma Comes Opportunity
It would be very easy to write piece after piece complaining about the frustration of working from a stigmatized place, to rail against the system that tells us that sex is dirty, that interest in sex is necessarily prurient, that we must hide any and all discussions of sex behind a filter of NSFW.
It would be very easy to do that; it would also be very depressing and relatively pointless. And so, in the fourth installment of the Pink Ghetto, I would like to take a moment to reflect on some of the more positive aspects of operating out of stigmatized territory.
When I was twenty years old, I was a CEO. I was getting interviewed for pieces in respectable national publications, I was being treated as an authority in my chosen field. People respected what I had to say, and even today, even after several years of keeping a low profile, I still get requests for interviews. My opinion, thoughts, and experiences are still valued, still treated as worthwhile.
I got that, I got to this place, because I wasn’t afraid of stepping into the Pink Ghetto; even more so, because I was willing to bring my best efforts, to bring talent and care and charisma, to my Pink Ghetto work. I didn’t shy away from the stigma: I gave it my all. And because I was one of relatively few people willing to do that, I stood out. I gained notoriety. I gained a voice.
I hate the stigma that comes with the work that I do. I’m also fully aware that it is the stigma that makes it so appealing. I go to the places that I go because the aura of the Pink Ghetto frightens away other talented individuals, and in doing so, in being willing to take the risks that I take, I stake out this land as my world, my area of expertise.
I would love to live in a world where the study of sexuality is viewed on the same level as any other academic discipline, where a healthy attitude toward sexuality is recognized as a fundamental part of a healthy lifestyle. I don’t live in that world, not yet, and so I am happy, eager, to fight for that world, even if it means slipping into the Pink Ghetto. Even if it means taking on the weight, the oppression, the fear of the stigma in order to do it. With stigma comes opportunity, and embracing the stigma of the Pink Ghetto, taking it head-on, has given me opportunities and experiences far beyond any I might have achieved out in the mainstream world.
To Have or Have Not: Sex on the Wedding Night
Jill Eisenstadt
Four a.m, one hour till dawn, and our four-star suite was still full of revelers. One hour in which to get out of our wedding clothes, tally the gift checks, have sex.
It was our wedding night. Of course we’d do it. This I truly believed despite the hour. Blame it on bridal magazines, Hollywood or my own naïveté, but when I agreed to take part in the marriage rites I assumed that meant all of them. Why else would I have worn the (new) white gown, the (old) tiara and the (borrowed) garter that gave me prickly heat? Why would I have held up the ceremony to shove something blue (a Canada Dry label) into my cleavage? Why would I have let my father “give me away?” Maybe it was unrealistic to expect an all-night bubble bath erotica. But surely our vows would be consummated. For all I knew, our license wasn’t even valid otherwise: unravished come sunrise, I’d turn into a pumpkin, or worse—a single girl again.
That I hadn’t technically been a girl in a while only heightened my anticipation. What could be more intense than a second chance to lose your innocence? This time without pain or hair-trigger conclusion. What more fitting way to mark the commitment to exclusive lovemaking till death (or divorce) did us part than with “le petit mort,” as the French like to call orgasm, preferably followed by rebirth and fireworks. After years of “sin,” what could be more thrilling than the inaugural bedding of a legally married woman?
Unfortunately, I had to wait for the answers to these questions. It appears that a great many us have had to wait. “Did you or didn’t you?” I began asking friends and acquaintances over the months, then years that followed my wedding. Not the most scientific method, yet the response were revealing. Many laughed nervously, evaded the question, changed the subject. But the overwhelming majority finally gave an excuse:
“Bladder infection. I cried.”
“Mono. I was contagious.”
“Spent the whole night on a plane.”
“…
in a car.”
“… sitting in traffic.”
“… stuck at the airport.”
“…mile after mile of no vacancy signs.”
“We fought about what he said to my high school friends.”
“…fought with that cheapskate caterer.”
“…fought about my ex-husband.”
“Pillow fight.”
“Morning sickness… Yes, at night.”
Of the few who did claim victory, only one ever described the act as being anything out of the ordinary. And I quote: “…A little like date rape.” The others just thought they “had to” or “should.” They just “did it” to “do it.” Laugh we might, but somehow, we still feel we’re just supposed to have sex on our wedding nights. When we don’t we think of it as a bad omen. Or as one friend, Tara, put it: “I felt like we’d flunked some kind of test.”
After years of living together, she and her fiancé Bill had spent a chaste prenuptial week in separate (but equal) apartments. He wasn’t allowed a preview of her “virginal” gown. She wasn’t allowed a review of his “worldly” bachelor party. From the proposal on bended knee to the send-off under a shower of politically incorrect white rice, they’d performed their traditional bride and groom roles flawlessly.
“We had the honeymoon suite with a king-size water bed, the complimentary champagne, the works….” But then something—or rather nothing—happened. “We conked out.”
“Blacked out.”
“Crashed. The whole wedding party in a big pile.”
Barring the religious, most people nowadays wouldn’t dream of marrying somebody with whom they hadn’t slept. Common sense says that ignorance is dangerous. Better to know the body to which you’re pledging monogamy. Rule out incompatible fetishes and irreparable conditions. Decide you like the bed you’re getting into. A lot. Marrying later, we’re hardly naïve. So what’s all this hullabaloo over a one-shot screw? Why is everyone still playing the same old game, pretending that the bride is still a virgin?
Best Sex Writing 2008 Page 12