Maria Diaz lady business. pop culture. whatever.

My Sex 2.0 Session

So Sex 2.0 is this coming weekend. I'm excited to get some time in hotel rooms (I love hotels) and to go to DC as an adult and not an AP history obsessed teenager. I'm super excited to be around a bunch of smart sex people and unlike most conferences I go to, this one won't be about monetizing the Internet. Sex and tech is uh, kind of my thing.

Because I always want to be in the front of the room, I am leading a class on the "revenge porn" trend. My updated description never made it onto the schedule, but here's what I wrote:

I just saw your ass on Myspace: A discussion on revenge porn

With smart phones and your mom on Facebook, what used to be private polaroids and video tapes can now get sent to everyone you've ever met within seconds -- whether or not you want it there. This class will discuss ways to express ourselves sexually using new technology and dealing with the ever present risk having the evidence disseminated online the minute things turn south. This class will cover ways to cope with a Revenge Porn & "Sexting" world.

Basically, it's my usual private vs public discussion. What inspired this was the Gretchen Rossi drama in late February. For those of you who don't know, I am a paid TV blogger and my beat is the Bravo network. Gretchen is a Real Housewife of Orange County. She was the latest addition, younger than the other cast members and she had some conflict with the other cast members. Anyway, there were a ton of rumors floating around that Gretchen was cheating on her dying, twice her age, fiance Jeff during filming. When the show was over, this dude, who she dated after Jeff died when the show wrapped, started to post photos about her on any website that would have him. This continues to this day.

So, I was fascinated by this story because Gretchen thought she had her tiny story line wrapped in a bow. We've already seen that society loves to hate "gold diggers" and Gretchen played the reality show game perfectly. And then this tool came around and blew her reputation up. Around the same time, I found a Details story about "revenge porn" and how many amateur porn videos on the tube sites (fantasti.cc, xtube, etc) get labeled as being from ex-es. And that's where this idea came from. I also thought bringing it up at Sex 2.0, where a bunch of the attendees have been naked on the Internet for either money or because they're sex bloggers and put their own naked photos online for things like "Half Naked Thursday", would make for an interesting session.

But my point for clarifying here is, the class is meant to be more a discussion on how technology makes it possible for us to express ourselves, but can also create things like this, because it's so easy to distribute and copy. Photos don't really belong to their owners anymore. It's much more about privacy than about porn or sex itself. I also want to discuss the idea that maybe at one point society will change and putting this stuff up won't be used as retaliation. Not that I realistically think this, but its one question to explore.

Anyway, I'm irritated that my session is at the same time as Melissa and Joanne (from Tomorrow Museum) but I'll deal. I'm a little concerned by the things Amber brought up in this post (namely by how some of the feminist stuff has fallen by the wayside and the more kink-centric feeling of the event which is fine but not what I'm going to the conference for and just not my thing) but I'm going into it with an open mind.