My Washington Post essay on Anthony Weiner and the allure of sexting

It's been a busy writing week, to say the least. I share all my writings on Twitter and my Facebook page if you want to keep up with the latest. By the end of today, I'll have filed seven pieces this week so it's hard even for me to keep track of them all! When something like the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal happens, a writer like me who's covered the topic in the past is often inundated with people wanting your opinion. Sometimes that's a good thing, because it forces you to keep up with the latest news and write quickly, without second guessing. Sometimes it feels daunting because I actually prefer to pause and (over)think and sometimes even agonize over my writing, but these days, with two part time jobs that equal full time hours, I don't have the time for that.

My first piece on was for Salon about the Weiner story and how he contradicted his past remorse.

Then The Washington Post asked me to explore why sexting draws so much attention for there PostEverything section, so I did. This was my second piece for that section (following last year's essay on hoarding) and rather than explore too much of the details of Weiner himself, I focused on the act of sexting and what makes it special.



If you want to hear even more from me on the topic, tune in to Radio New Zealand for Saturday Morning with Kim Hill, which airs at 6:12 p.m. EST tonight (Friday, September 2, for those on the East Coast of the U.S.).

"Penis Gagging, BDSM, and Rape Fantasy: The Truth About Kinky Sexting"

Check out my latest SexIs Magazine column, "Penis Gagging, BDSM, and Rape Fantasy: The Truth About Kinky Sexting" - I didn't hold back!



“You don’t want to gag a woman with your penis unless you have some serious issues with the way you see women.” So says Kirsten Powers, ex-girlfriend of sex-scandal star Congressman Anthony Weiner, in a piece for The Daily Beast. She is referencing his sexting relationship with a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. The transcript of their texts was posted by Radar Online, including one bit that prompted Powers’ musing: “You will gag on me before you c** with me in you” and “[I’m] thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***.”

This column is not about Weiner. I’m pretty over political sex scandals and am inclined to think that someone like Weiner wanted to get caught, consciously or unconsciously. The only positive thing I can say about such scandals is that they do help shed light on just how unenlightened we are about topics like monogamy and BDSM. Here we have an example of a woman making a blanket statement about something she clearly doesn’t know the first thing about, simply because it offends her.

You know the phrase, “Taken out of context, I must seem so strange?” That goes double for pulling random bits of erotic conversation, texted or otherwise, and analyzing them as if they told a whole story. Without the motivation of the person sending and receiving them, you really don’t know anything, and yet it seems that a default anti-BDSM reaction is acceptable. Our public squeamishness over the fact that some people can eroticize pain, degradation, and being ordered around, safely, consensually and pleasurably, is nothing more than a prejudice that needs to be eradicated.

Read the whole column, and if you like it, please spread the word - social media buttons at the top, or whatever your preferred method. Thank you!

Press!

Eugene Weekly reviews Best Sex Writing 2010 and plugs Sunday night's reading with me, Kerry Cohen (aka Michelle Perrot) and Janet Hardy!

The fury comes in specifically in one of the strongest non-personal pieces, Judith Levine’s brilliant “What’s the Matter with Teen Sexting?” Hey! That’s a great damn question! Why are (some) adults so freaked out about teen sexuality? How could anyone prosecute kids as sex offenders for sending nude photos of themselves to their friends or partners?

Well, perhaps it’s because they never read Thomas MacAulay Millar’s “Toward a Performance Model of Sex,” which takes the women’s sexuality=cow milk equivalence and knocks it back into the Pandora’s box of misogyny. Admittedly, Millar’s is a long, meandering, top-heavy argument that spends too long with the buildup and not enough time at the climax, but combined with Ellen Friedrichs’ “Sex Laws That Can Really Screw You,” the essay provides a powerful backing for reconceptualizing sexual agency.

In between these more reported, factual pieces come the first-person experience snippets. Some of these, like Perrot’s, are both literary and erotic; some of them, like Diana Joseph’s “The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No” and Kirk Read’s “It’s a Shame About Ray,” contain moving portraits of their writers or the people closest to them. Joseph’s piece in particular illustrates sensitive, painful clashes between parent and child, between different conceptualizations of female sexuality, between the mom’s experiences of a sexual life and the junior-high-aged son’s callous dismissal of girls’ ability to define themselves. “The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No” leads the book, and it’s gorgeous; few of the following pieces live up to its promise, and some are flat-out poorly written even if the information contained in them has value in a society that doesn’t really understand how to talk about sex and sexuality.

Brooklyn Ink podcast takes you inside my erotic writing workshops at Shag in Brooklyn - if you're on the fence about attending, listen to this. I have 2 more (see previous post), February 27 and March 6. Students get high priority with my anthologies - I'm about to announce two more which there'll be lots of spots in. Plus I'm bringing cupcakes. The last 2 workshops have been small but fascinating.

My sexting advice for Tiger Woods

I wrote a piece about dos and don'ts of sexting for Tiger Woods (and you!) at The Daily Beast.

Here's a snippet:

Don’t:

1. Ask who else she’s seeing

“Do you have a boyfriend” and “who is your new boy toy,” Woods asked Grubbs. Not only is it not his business, it sours the mood he’s trying to create. Keep your texts about the relationship at hand, not possible outside entanglements.

Dos

1. Start slow

This doubles as good advice when it comes to putting the first move on someone. Don’t leap straight into explicit language until you know that’s what the other person’s into. Woods and Grubbs were already seeing each other once their risqué texts started flying. David Borgenicht, co-author of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Dating and Sex, agrees. “Know your audience” is his first rule (this, I’d say, also applies to dirty talk). “Don't be overly blunt or crude if your sexting target is shy. When it comes to intimacy use double entendres and suggestive language rather than blunt statements of desire or graphic descriptions of actions you'd like to take.”

Read the rest at The Daily Beast (and be sure to check out the lively comments section).

There was a piece in The New York Times last week, "Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on The Collar," by Laura M. Holson and I really liked this part:

Sherry Turkle, a professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied interaction with technology for more than two decades. Unlike with computers, Professor Turkle said, consumers have a deeply personal connection to their cellphones, where they keep contact lists and family photos. “They carry them in their pockets,” she said, “next to their skin.”

One woman Professor Turkle spoke to for a study was so grief-stricken after she had misplaced her cellphone that she described the loss as a death. “People feel it is an extension of their body and mind,” the professor said, but, she added: “Like Peter Pan, we do not see our electronic shadow until it is pointed out to us. We assume it is not there.”

I really liked this image, and it made me think about how and why texts are more personal then emails, and how it's easier to overlook emails. Sure, maybe you're getting hundreds of texts a day, but probably not, and certainly on an iPhone, they show up differently than email does. Plus your phone is the only device that's going to receive that text message, whereas an email can be retrieved from multiple sources.