Image: Safia Bahmed Schwartz
“A lot of people don’t know what they like. A lot of people just do what they think they’re supposed to do.” I said this to my partner in that ‘asking for a friend’ manner. I spoke about myself - but knew it was bigger than myself.
Despite working in sextech, I didn’t have all the answers to my sexual questions. Because of working in sextech, I knew many people didn’t have their answers either. I knew some people weren’t even asking the questions. And those that were looking, were looking in a Sisyphean way - repeating the same task, failing and not finding resolution. I was too.
Regardless of my self-reflective personal conviction in most life capacities. Regardless of my active and long term pursuit of sexual adventures - or maybe because of them - I don’t fantasize. I’m satisfied enough to remain in the cycle, but dissatisfied enough to know I don’t want to be.
Perhaps the dissatisfaction comes from my work - being privy to the lives of starry-eyed fuckers (aka sex influencers) with their kinks on identified and prioritized platters. Perhaps it’s the greater cultural revolution and boom of the industry magnifying the seeking of sexual growth. Or perhaps I’m actually ready to drop my excuses and admit I am fucking without purpose.
I’m on a mission to find my mission - sexually. I’m calling the process the erotic church.
THE TIP-ING POINT OF A SEX REVOLUTION
In late 2018, before I knew of my sexual directionlessness, I joined the sextech world. I moved to Barcelona to research the alternative porn industry. Serendipitously, mostly unrelated to Spain, and “categorically not porn,” I began working with Cindy Gallop to grow her sextech startup MakeLoveNotPorn.
Nearly a decade earlier, Cindy Gallop spoke at TED. Her talk ‘Make Love, Not Porn’ was the talk of the world wide web. So she made it a company. To create a world in which her startup could be understood, Cindy wrote the definition of sextech: technology, and technology-driven ventures, designed to enhance, innovate and disrupt in every area of human sexuality and human sexual experience.
When I came on board, my job was to help us grow. We (and our MakeLoveNotPornstars) doubled our revenue. Sextech was/is having a ‘moment.’ A moment that has been brewing for some time. Porn was exploding into a galaxy of genres (see: Adult Time, XConfessions, OnlyFans), toys were being made by companies with sexual health, orgasm-gap-closing, ethos (see: Dame, Unbound), and new literature has been published (see: Mal Journal). We knew it would continue but we didn’t foresee that a pandemic would become the ‘epidemic’ to pull sextech into a full Malcolm Gladwellian Tipping Point.
A tipping point being that exact moment in time when a growing trend becomes cultural phenomena. And as prophet Gladwell says, “to bring a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior… you need to create a community around them, where those new beliefs can be practiced and expressed and nurtured.” Which is precisely what MakeLoveNotPorn has been doing, along with numerous other sextech organizations. Ready for the world to join.
THE GREAT TOUCH DEPRIVATION
“When we are deprived of intimacy, we only crave it more deeply, more viscerally.” As intimacy expert Esther Perel puts it, “In times of distress, our priorities get reorganized.” Since the Great Touch Deprivation - as research firm Triptk calls our 2020 social-distance-laden pandemic - MakeLoveNotPorn, and other intimate sites, have seen a 33-75% increase in members in a matter of months. The populous had skin cravings, and they fueled the growing fires of sextech. And sextech disrupted their collective sexuality.
Lockdown fueled the fire for me, too. But in the negative version of that metaphor. My supremely loving relationship, and my above-average quantity and quality of orgasms (yes, privilege), could no longer subdue the burning need to fill an unknown hole (no pun intended). I was no longer satisfied with being satisfied. I needed disruption.
Along with the other hundred thousand accounting for the 33-75% increases, I joined the gentrification of online sex work. As with many, it was to add newness to my extroversion-lacking locked down (love) life. And as for many, it was to fix something that felt now necessary to address. But unlike many fellow first-time sharers, before jumping into a pre-existing community and financial ecosystem of sex workers, I had been fortunate to work in the sextech industry with them.
CRITICS HATE TO LOVE ORGASMS, BUT ALL PUBLICITY IS GOOD PUBLICITY
Haters have hated sex since Eden. With the rise in sex-sharing, the shaming of it undoubtedly follows. Historically, the negative receptions have dramatically affected people, (especially women, queers, and people of colour), with a witch hunt extremity - lost jobs, threatened lives and stigmatic cultural exile.
Joining the world of online sex comes with risks and effort. As sex worker Jessie Sage advises: it isn’t risk-free, nor quick and easy - “the number of followers that you need to have in order to make this work, to make it profitable, also opens you up to scrutiny and whore stigma.”
But this movement brings a normalization. Outwardly identifying with the parts of ourselves we previously kept hidden, during the ‘stay home’ age (or being #hornyonmain as the internet says) builds a comfort and unwillingness to continue to remain in the shadows (a phenomenon especially resonant with queer folks.)
This mass outing of Self as Sexual, though accompanied by risk, is positive. I foresee a future where Kim Kardashian doesn’t need money and a decade to bounce back from the shame of a sex tape release. And non-billionaire non-men can casually pronounce they’d rather have their sexts publicized than be shamed and blackmailed into keeping them hidden, as Jeff Bezos has done. Enabling all to create, share and profit financially and emotionally in their own personal harmony. Especially those for which experiencing and creating sexual art isn’t a hobby but a necessary lifestyle.
THE FEELING OF LYING, WHILE NOT LYING
Thanks to my attitude, upbringing, and privilege, I’ve always known what I want, and got it.
With sex, it’s the opposite: I don’t know specifically what I want, and though nobody can talk me into anything, I’ll try almost everything. When newly locked-down me decided to try online sex work, I spontaneously jumped off its beginner cliff: camming. My partner and I decided to try sexual live streaming on a major cam site (a workplace, but not my workplace).
My immersive sextech education, past sexcapades and the confidence of a body-on-the-line activist couldn’t have prepared me for what was in store.
There is something about being given directions from a faceless stranger (such as: let me see his cum drip out of you), and knowing you don’t want to follow their directions, that helps you realize mid-denying that you yourself are directionless and in denial. My sexual identity, as I knew it, was finally disrupted.
A quick, and dirty, lesson that many wouldn’t need to be in Rome to learn, but I gravitate toward the hard and fast education system of failure. One need not be standing in the Trevi Fountain to know you’ll get splashed, but the gaze of a thousand watching you soak - regardless of how sexy it may look - helps solidify the lesson of chill whilst wet. Even if you can’t name that lesson immediately, the feeling is deeply present.
The feeling I had while camming felt like lying. I didn’t have a name for that immediately, though.
TELEDILDONIC VIBRATORS CAN USE WORDS BUT THEY WON’T ANSWER YOUR QUESTION
When my explorations began, I reached algorithm fatigue quickly. Allowing a small monopoly of tech giants to prepare one’s entire erotic education and diet is as counterproductive to sexual health as eating solely processed foods is for gut health. The result - tube site porn constipation.
In the further carving of my sexual utopia, I went beneath the surface in search of unique content. I spelunked the edges and depths of sextech and alternative porn. Each new journey felt as glittery and new as the side street that led me to an untasted ice cream shop.
But regardless of my search locale (audio porn, teledildonic vibrators that use morse code, sex club memberships, crystal dildos, erotic literature) nothing had that Goldilocks ‘just right’ fit, and claiming it as Mine felt like the kind of lying I embody while wearing someone else’s clothes. My external searches rendered me aware of all highway billboards’ offer but lost on my highway of desire.
It wasn’t until I was gifted an Alexa that I realized the real issue. I didn’t have the words to ask the questions, let alone give directions. In being too dependent on auto-complete search results and self-populating recommendations, I’d lost the research skill I most needed: I couldn’t form a self-inquiring question to identify my fantasies.
THE EROTIC CHURCH WELCOMES YOU
First at an industry conference for sextech, and later to others, my boss Cindy Gallop spoke about the significance of this moment in time - driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. She said, “The world will never be the same again, and that is a great thing for those of us who were never okay with the status quo to begin with. It is only when things break down this utterly and completely that allows completely new models and new ways of thinking to emerge.”
Algorithm fatigue and skin hunger emphasized a phenomenon that had been swelling. A tipping point in culture has cemented a growing trend into a cultural, philosophical and artistic movement. The world is in a sexual revolution and renaissance. Some might call it a gentrification of sex on the internet. For me, it’s a Jungian individuation, a shadow reconciliation, and it’s my job.
Now, in the re-rebuilding of my sexual utopia, I start tool-less, map-less and bare. To find the words, to ask the questions, to self-inquire, I’m using the original game-changing technology: language. I’ll write to myself until I’ve coded my own self-knowledge-algorithm.
If your sexual status quo isn’t good enough, join me at your erotic church.
Read more essays on the politics of pleasure in Issue 4, The Reverie Issue.
Learn more about the Erotic Church here.