As you are doubtless aware, most of the residents of New York City are somehow involved with blogging about their deviant sexualities. Thus the 2009 and 2010 New York City Sex Bloggers Calendars, featuring the likes of, among others, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Audacia Ray, and Lucy Vonne in hubba hubba poses far away from their keyboards.
The 2011 edition will, like its predecessors, benefit the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. But next year the calendar will be national.
We want any sex positive blogger/internet personality – male, female, gay, straight, queer, trans, any race, any orientation, any size – who writes/podcasts/video blogs about sex or sexuality to feel free to submit a photo.
Submissions are not due until May 1 but I am letting you know early, as I expect every microblogging porn star between the zip codes of 90000-93599 will want to be involved.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Nina Hartley’s heart-shaped ass as a fundamental human right; Fellatio makes the heart grow fonder; Audacia’s (cup) half-full
See also: Call for 2011 submissions
I know you’re professional friends (at the least) with them, but I’ve gotten very frustrated with Audacia Ray and Lux Nightmare. They were two of my favorite models/performers in the early naughts–I mean, biff bang pow–and then they pretty much stopped modeling. And fair enough. People move on, etc. But now that they run in these insular navel-gazing academic-sexuality circles, it’s almost as if, despite their ardent (and fair) defenses of sex-workers and general “sex positive” attitudes, they acknowledge their pasts as sex workers themselves in passing if at all. There’s nary a trace of it on Ray’s blog, which used to have a section devoted to where one could find her sets along with accounts of her own sexual encounters, feelings, etc. And That Strange Girl now exists as a CV, which makes mention of her “founding” the website but not as a model there or nakkiednerds. It’s almost as if they seem to think their modeling pasts illegitimizes their academic arguments, and that in and of itself seems to send a mixed message.
(The flip side of this–which proves that maybe I just like to complain–is that I always found it kinda eye-rolling when people who posed for softcore photos on alt-porn sites in very safe settings take up the mantle for their “sex worker bretheren” as if they experienced the same thing a prostitute in Karachi or even the Tenderloin does. But it’s a very noble cause, and someone has to, so my eye-rolling be damned in the scheme of things).
And so there’s this calendar–even in the guise of a “girly calendar,” it’s tame cheesecake. I’ll buy a half-dozen of the 2011 calendars if Ray sex-positively doffs her clothing. (And I’ll buy one anyway if not as penance for my rants here.)
Even in our great enlightenment it’s always a tradeoff, it seems, between when the nudity goes away and the more academic cause of sex culture commentary comes in.
Do we take people more or less seriously if they are disseminating pictures of themselves in sexy poses?