Sounds like a romance title, but maybe for a cupcake and panty romance. She’ll be at my house in an hour; while I wait and print author contracts for Best Women’s Erotica 2008 (nice cover, Cleis), dig the Vixen’s recent interview on Bookslut:
“Alt porn” is hot right now. Violet Blue just gave her adult video recommendations to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine and chances are your frat-jock neighbor has a Suicide Girls subscription. The silicon-breasted San Fernando Valley gold standard seems stuck in the past — even if she is “barely legal.” But those Suicide Girls aren’t quitting their day jobs and most “indie” porn producers are barely breaking even. As Audacia Ray explains in her new book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Sexploration, alt porn is no “cash cow,” but it further individualizes our sexual exploration. With clever chapter titles like “Girls Gone Wired” and “Our Bodies, Our Broadbands,” Ray examines how online activity impacts our sexuality. Web cams, Craig’s List Casual Encounters, and “teledildonics” offer entirely new ways to get off, but anonymity can never be taken for granted.
Audacia Ray is the Merlin Mann of the sex bloggers. She’s the executive editor of $pread magazine, written for and by sex workers, and contributes to Fleshbot, as well as maintaining her personal website, Waking Vixen. Plus, she just graduated with a MA in American Studies from Columbia University and, earlier this year, released the video “Bi Apple,” which she wrote and directed.
Over Japanese food, before her reading in Boston, I asked her some questions about the book.
You just got back from Amsterdam. Can you tell me a little about that?
I went for a conference called C’Lick Me. It was supposed to be a non-academic conference [but] it ended up more academic than I hoped it would be. There were a lot of presentations that were like, “I wrote a paper and now I’m going to read it.” My presentation was a slideshow that included naked pictures of myself.
So you have the opposite of that public speaking chestnut. You can imagine everyone’s seen you naked.
Right. And they do! The first slide I showed was a picture from my boyfriend who went with me. We wrote the name of the conference — “C’Lick Me” — across my knuckles. We were up on the roof deck of the hotel I stayed at. I stripped down, held up my boobs, and he took the picture. That was the first picture in the slideshow. It was like, “Hi, I’m Audacia Ray. These are my boobs. Anyway!”
Link.
Come join Dacia and I chatting about sex and the internets here in SF tomorrow night.
Update: the event has been moved to At CSC, 290 Division Suite 405, cross 10th and Brannan. $5-$20 sliding scale. Someone good gets the money, I don’t know who :) Starts at 7:30!
