The other night I talked with sex blogger/director/performer Audacia Ray when she stopped by a Venice Blvd. sex shop to read from her book “Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration”.
As a large part of our living comes from writing about sex, and as Ray and I are both tremendously sexy people, was it possible to have a conversation without writing about it? Did not writing about it make it less real?
Find the inevitable answer after the break in the HTML continuum.
Freddy & Eddy’s is a bookstore/sex shop in an unlikely spot west of Centinela on Venice Blvd. run by husband and wife team Ian (Freddy) and Alicia (Eddy) Denchasy. When they started the online version of their store, which preceded the physical one, several years ago, they both had day jobs that didn’t lend themselves to selling dildos and floggers.
So Ian chose the names “Freddy and Eddy”, the characters played by Michael McKean and David Lander in the 1980 movie Used Cars. (They also played Lenny and Squiggy in “Laverne And Shirley”.)
“They were ambiguous names, and wouldn’t give us away,” said Alicia. “I was working in a law form and Ian was a teacher.”
Ray read selections from her book in a cozy back patio, furnished with wine, cherries, and Costco pizza. Among the attendees were Vena Virago and Suki and Brian Vatter, creators of the iPod vibrator OhMiBod, which I reviewed last year for Fleshbot.
Ray has been on the road supporting her book since May, stopping in places like Boston, Charlotte, and Amsterdam. Her ex-boyfriend is staying in her apartment in New York while she’s out.
“In New York we have a real estate problem?” Ray said, “so sometimes your apartment woes trump your relationships, and you end up living with your exes.”
“Naked”‘s seven chapters deal primarily with how women express their sexuality online, via media from blogs to chatboards to cyberdildonics.
Each reading is followed by a Q & A period, and Ray observed that, regardless of city, people tend to focus their questions on the commercial sex/sex-for-money chapters.
“One woman in Baltimore finally asked, ‘Is this whole book about commercial sex?'” Ray recalled. “And I said, ‘No, but all these questions seem to be’.”
The L.A. audience’s questions focused on academia. I was proud of them. Ray said she picks her battles when deciding whether or not to mention her own sex work in academic settings.
She also shied away from predicting the future of online sexuality and explained why there wasn’t a lot of Ray herself in the book.
“I found that of the 80 women I interviewed, any time I was about to offer up my own story, they had already lived it.”
It’s easy to forget (for me, anyway), that not everyone writes everything down.
“I have a boyfriend now, and I don’t write too much about him on my blog,” Ray told the audience. “It really helps the relationship.”
Ray reads well but does not make a performance of it. She said she varies what she reads to keep herself interested, but does not choose chapters depending on her audience. Nothing in the reading, therefore, seemed titillating, it only seemed informative.
I read the book online, where the Internet lives, but the book is available in terrestrial form. Having a word like “Internet” in the title, with the book’s Matrix-y cover art, made me wonder if the book will still be relevant in ten years, if it is instantly topical but also inevitably obsolete, the way we are immediately jarred out of a movie when we see an old, bulky cell phone.
But the Internet, however it will continue to be defined, is just the latest vehicle for self-expression, so the book will date itself with mentions of chatboard URLs and millennial technology but will also remain evergreen, as the Internet is only the latest means by which boobs can be presented for approval.
Ray and I stared at each other for a bit. I asked if, now that she writes everything down, what remains secret in her life.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If I don’t write this down, will it have really happened?”
Previously: Audacia goes the extra mile; Bi Apple review
See also: Audacia Ray, Buy “Naked on the Internet“, Why mentioning a skin horse is not dirty in this context
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