(via Tomorrow Museum, via fimoculous)

To pull the sheets back for a moment, Sexerati has produced sex in what we would once have called my future (the present) in forms that still feel novel. The Pink Ghetto has jumped to the printed page, in this year’s volume of Best Sex Writing. The first bit of sex gossip I manhandled from a rising star blogger put us in bed together (and love, which is even filthier). Queen of all glories, though, is having the sex smart writers who inspired me way before day one take notice, and for the encouragement of the internet generation of sex media makers to provoke the whole thing on (Susannah and Viviane and Dacia especially).

In fact, Susannah beat me to a 2008 forecast, and did it even better than I could have, and in part using my own words which read:

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 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 about 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 and studying sex, and educating about sex are not some marginal activity, or at least, they should be thought of as such no longer. For 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.

Though I’m not one for themes all the time, I do get it up for a good, long theoretical wrestle with a question. Which as of today is, “How can I explain how the internet isn’t ruining sex?”

Until we’re bent into the floor, wet with pride and choice words, and this time even a few live shots of the action as it unfolds, I’ll be tackling it hard now and right here. (Edit, 2008.02.16: and for more of my personal take on sex, my tumblr is here.)

One from the vaults, to keep you warm while Sexerati HQ moves. Bless you all, and thanks for a year of smart sex.

Taking for granted that you’ve got a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to be a (little) sexxxy in (sort of) public (hey, you’re reading this), here’s my quickest, dirtiest tutorial on how to be a camgirl, or camboy (how in need the world is!), camwhore, or what have you…

Choose your camera. Get as fancy as you can afford, or already have sitting around the house. Whether you’ve got a DV camera with USB or FireWire, or some lofi little wonder that came free with an old computer, plug it in and try it. Now most of your prefab ‘Runs on XP!’ PC numbers are going to come packaged with their drivers, and even if they aren’t, you can scoop up most of them online. On a Mac, your easiest options are the iSight or the third-party iMage (though I can’t say if the image quality is any good). Back in the days of OS 9, I was a big devotee of the 3Com HomeConnect (used above), but with OS X, its drivers no longer worked (ok thx bye Steve-o). Today, thanks to macam, it and many other fabulous ‘pc-only’ cameras are supported by this life (and hotness) saving driver. (On Ubuntu or whatever open source warrior flavor of Linux you might be running, you hardly need me to tell you to just dive in and get messy with cables until something works.)

Choose your cam capture software. No one is really developing great one-to-many webcam programs anymore — it seems usage has shifted more towards one-to-one videoconferencing. That’s all well and good for the shysters, but if you want to be a camstar, you’ve got to get very late 90’s on the problem. Webcam32 is the original, which is PC-only. Oculus and EvoCam for the Mac are well-tooled descendants of its first widely used cam program, CoolCam, and are what I still use, six years hence.

So once you’ve downloaded your software and plugged in your weapon of choice, you’ll need to do about five minutes of setup, letting the app know where to upload your images (your server), how often to upload an image (30 seconds is classic), and where on your local computer to archive them (don’t skip this step). The program window ought to give you at minimum a preview window so you can set up your shot, a progress bar to let you know how soon before upload, and a selection of filters and adjustments.

Choose to have a sense of style. What’s surprising about these seemingly low-powered apps is that they all give you, the artist (yes you are), the power to do the equivalent of Photoshop on the fly to yourself. Anyone can jack off to the pale blue light of their monitor, so why not have at the brightness/contrast, RGB, exposure, and (my old standby) customized gradient filters (you, too, can get that signature ’shakticam’ feeling with a spread of #FFFFFF and #330000). Layer on the previous image, or any old image, for an onion-skin like ghostly effect, or, just go classic French New Wave and keep it black, white, and hot.

Choose to break the rules with the REFRESH tag. This is where that one really sings, in all its noncompliant glory. If you already have a webpage for your cam ready to go, just add this bit of code:

<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="30">

or, make with my webcam template and forget all about messy markup entirely.

That’s it — that’s really all you need by way of the mechanics of the matter. What you choose to add with desklamps, fairy lights, Sharpies, thrifted lingerie, Amish costumes, birthday cakes, nerdcore glasses, mirrors, other people’s hands, and the like is all up to you. For more resources realtime, keep an eye on the webcam tag in my del.icio.us feed.

(And please send in your best cam captures and let me know if I can share them, yes? I’ve already put some of my favorites of my own from 2001 - 2003 up there at the top of the post, so do come [full] on.)

That? That was the shiver of agreeing with Valleywag for this tip: 2007’s standout flirting-for-nerds site iminlikewithyou, in trying to adopt web video’s hotness, has jumped its own rainbow-striped shark. Where the limited interface and smarts required to seduce well with it once drew out the best in commitment-free wit, the rapid-fire comments users can now leave in exchange for dropping some points are needlessly lowering the bar. Unsolicited suggestion: find some way to integrate a CrazyBlindDate-esque feature, and fast.

The author of more than 145 professional publications in the area of infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Rice said he was “gathering information” at the time of his arrest and was not guilty of offering to engage in sex for a fee, the offense with which he was charged. He has been placed on leave since his arrest, according to a UMass spokesman.

Judge Paul F. LoConto entered a not-guilty plea on Dr. Rice’s behalf, released him on personal recognizance and continued his case to Dec. 17.

According to a written statement filed by police in support of their application for a criminal complaint, a female police officer was working undercover in the area of Main and Grand streets shortly before 12:20 p.m. Saturday when a man later identified as Dr. Rice pulled up next to her in a black BMW.

The officer, who was posing as a prostitute, approached Dr. Rice, who had his driver’s side window down, according to the statement.

“They engaged in conversation and he requested that she provide him with sex, according to the police account. The undercover officer signaled fellow officers in the area and Dr. Rice was stopped and arrested.

UMass administrators are now claiming that they knew nothing about this aspect of his project. You can read between the lines yourself — Dr. Rice’s abstract from a 2005 study is similar if not a continuation of his current study, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Extramural Activities.

Only $40, professor? I know sex researchers have trouble enough getting government funding. What do we do now?

Chinese state media (I know, reputable) report that condoms being recycled into hairbands are posing an HIV/AIDS transmission risk. Really? HIV/AIDS can only live outside of the human body for at most 15 days in highly-controlled laboratory settings, and fluids lose 90-95% of their viral load through exposure to air. For HPV, though it can also live on outside the human body in the form of fluids present on objects (towels, toys, and the like), it’s most commonly transmitted through skin-to-skin contact — the risk of transmission after days, let alone what chemical process they may go through as part of rubber or latex recycling, is tiny.

Not that I’ll be doing a MAKE: Used-Condoms-Into-Accessories weekend project anytime soon, but are there any reports from China directly on this one? Are there now pink bins for condom recycling?

Update:
Shanghaist advises ladies to beware, asks for a doctor in the house.
Consumerist readers are thinking hoax as well.

Graydancer’s sum-up details how conversations he struck up with other bloggers were shyly broken off, how one of his models — previously down to be tied up for a performance at a conference party — declined at the last minute over fear of having her startup’s image tarnished, and of how little formal attention sexuality & new media were given on the program. Sad, but common, for sex people doing work outside our niche, whether that’s in or out of web circles. Then at a pajama party as part of the same conference, the owner of Vibrator.com was asked to leave by event organizers for giving out promotional stickers. Was this due their sexual content, or because, as Libby Durfee, co-founder and event producer of BlogWorld said, they were unfairly competing with exhibitors who had paid significant money to be there with their own products? Yes, it’s gross, but that’s the big business of blogging — not unlike the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, also held in Vegas. Now some sex bloggers are questioning Facebook for not permitting a sex blogger to have a profile under her professional, but not legal, name, and yes, I’m asking those questions, too.

But I fear that one of two things is coming to pass, and pass fast:

• The sex bloggers, they have arrived at web celebrity
• The sex bloggers, they have arrived, and my god, some of us are acting just as douchey as the rest of the web celebrities

In other words, important contributions, in the name of improving sexual health, relationships, and pleasure, and of better understanding the sex culture we all play a part in, are being made, and deserve recognition. Unfortunately, just having something smart to say isn’t enough, and so we get some of the behaviors of the so-called New Media Douchebags, that we love to hate but still sometimes indulge in ourselves: starting faux-controversies to get traffic, or worse, to build a brand around. Who wants to be known as “that blogger who had that big problem with [x]“? Some apparently do, and are trading on that sort of flamey attention gladly.

This might be why we can’t have nice things, blogosphere, and sex bloggers are no different. We have no greater claim than anyone else to authenticity or transparency just because it’s about sex with us. We feel just as alien and ostracized — more so, some — from the mainstream and our shoulder chips are significant, and we’re no kinder to one another for it. Though we might fuck really hard, or type really fast about the hard fucking we wish we were doing, just like the rest of the New Media Mafia, we’ll still plunk down a few hundred bucks for a sweatshop labor lanyard with a few dozen logos on it… so we feel like we belong? That we matter? That sex matters?

No schwag, no matter how many planes we had to Twitter we were waiting on to get it, can do that if we lose our inspiration and our wits along the way.