Seriously, what’s going on at TED? A site called makelovenotporn.com was launched there today, which, aside from the ridiculously presumptuous name posing porn and love as oppositional, is just the kind of shoddy deconstruction of porn one might expect from someone who has already decided that porn is a monolith that can be deconstructed at all.
TED (subtitle: “Ideas Worth Spreading”) is one of the conferences on the Very Important Conference Circuit. For those of us who are far more likely to enjoy TED by way of videos posted of the talks given there long after the fact, it’s hard to place how the audience there may react to discussions about porn, especially in the TED setting, which is supposed to be a place where Very Important Problems are thrown on the table for public inquiry. Well, sort of public: you have to be invited a member, and it costs a few thousand dollars to attend, and the rest of us can just watch on Twitter.
The conceit of the site is that users will submit their own feedback on what’s different between the bizarro porno reality and the one they occupy as their own. Without having a video of the presentation itself, it’s impossible to know if the site’s obsessive focus on the most gonzo of straight porn was given any context at all. Laudable effort to tell men (mostly men) who consider themselves some of society’s most brilliant problem solvers and innovators that stimulating clitorises is a great thing to do? Why not. Raising the issue as a way to trash the power of porn to educate rather than asking why porn is made the way it is? Or giving people who view porn, and that’s an awful lot of those people in that room, any understanding that what they may get off to on screen isn’t necessarily reflective of what they do in their own sex lives?
With luck, someone will take the stage at TED tomorrow to discuss why it is that so many people get their sex education from the few explicit materials available to them, why it is we in the United States are recovering from over a decade of public education without comprehensive sexuality education, why it is that issues of sexual health are so volatile that something as logical as providing contraceptive information as part of Federally funded programs can be used to hijack an economic stimulus package that could right our economic course.
Until then, jacking off on each other’s faces at least won’t get anyone pregnant.
Update. I checked in with ace futurist and one-time TED presenter Jamais Cascio for his thoughts on how porn may play at TED:
TED costs $6000+ per ticket to attend, so aside from a few invited guests (bloggers, students, and the like), the audience listening to the announcement of MLNP largely comprised wealthy tech-friendly liberals. I’m quite sure that the audience was both titillated and shocked at her language (heavens, she actually mentioned cum on a woman’s face!), and feeling pleased that *they* would never have taken porn sex for how sex should be. Some portion of the audience will clue in that the real message here is that real-world sex education is awful, but most will focus on the porn.
It would help if the site was (a) better-constructed, and (b) more accurate (all women can only come from clitoral stimulation?).
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MLNP reeks of “the clever”. The sort of wink and nod sex positivity that you find in sex and the city themed martini nights and bachelorette parties that feature sex toys. It’s not frank, honest sex talk, it’s titillation. It’s gawking at sex and pretending that you’re being intellectual. The notion that people are going to toss in their own lewd scenarios (”Not all blowjobs result in female orgasm!!!”) just seals it for me.
It’s a shame, because talking about why people watch porn and how that shapes them is a really fascinating topic. It’s more than just “it makes guys into lousy lays”.
A whole generation was denied adequate sexual education in an act of religious protectionism. And now we’re going to mock because some of them learned something, ANYTHING, about sex from pornography? I’m going to save my 4600 dollars, thanks.
Dare we say, this is an issue with crowd-sourced sex ed interventions? I guess it’s not that simple. @bitchmagazine gave MLNP props on Twitter, and suggested that “since anyone can submit!” that we offer our own comments on MLNP itself. Jiz Lee of Pink and White Porn offered something to queer the conversation just right: “Porn World: Doesn’t allow fisting. : ( ” VS. “Real World: Fisting for all! : )
Melissa - my apologies for a delayed response to your post due to the TED schedule.
I couldn’t agree more with you:
‘With luck, someone will take the stage at TED tomorrow to discuss why it is that so many people get their sex education from the few explicit materials available to them, why it is we in the United States are recovering from over a decade of public education without comprehensive sexuality education, why it is that issues of sexual health are so volatile that something as logical as providing contraceptive information as part of Federally funded programs can be used to hijack an economic stimulus package that could right our economic course.’
It’s unfortunate that the video of my actual presentation at TED was not able to be posted immediately following (I am not sure if it will be - I believe they don’t tend to post the 3-minute speaker slot ones), as I actually made precisely the point you’re making - which was that we live in a culture of puritanism and double standards, where people believe that teen abstinence campaigns will actually work; where parents are too embarrassed to talk to their kids about sex; and where educational institutions are too concerned about or confined by political correctness to be able to contribute to that conversation. All of which results in a complete lack of a counterbalance to porn that addresses sex education in a holistic, multi-faceted, open and honest way, in which porn is one part of that holistic education, discussion and awareness, rather than the primary conduit by which anyone learns anything about sex today.
I also specifically said in my talk that makelovenotporn.com is not about judgement. Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest range of proclivities possible. Makelovenotporn.com is also not anti-porn. I am a fan of porn and watch it regularly myself. I conceived and developed makelovenotporn.com simply to open up the discussion and to stimulate debate and dialogue that would provoke and encourage people to think more (and enact) around everything you are referring to. Hopefully, it is starting to do just that.
Hi, Cindy — I can appreciate you coming to comment on this, especially in the midst of a demanding conference.
One significant correction I have to offer you is that I don’t think “political correctness” has much to do with why comprehensive sex education is restricted from benefiting from public funding. Most parents of school-aged kids actually support it; it’s the ban on Federal funds for any school that offers comprehensive sex ed that’s left us with a generation that has included porn in their sex education more than ever before. (For that we can also thank the internet, which I whole-heartedly do.)
There’s something about the tone and actions requested on your site that really punched me in the gut when I first came across them. One is that I think it’s pretty unbelievable that a conference like TED gave any airtime to sexuality at all, and I think the way you used it didn’t do much of a service to broadening a conversation around porn that could lead to “ideas worth spreading.” Another reason is that the framing of the site plays to the sexist notion that women in porn aren’t real because they don’t have “real” sex. And for anyone who views porn, there’s something dehumanizing about your posing “reality” against “porn” — not because all sex looks like the highly stylized stunt-sex that the porn you describe depicts, but because I believe most people have the critical faculties to enjoy one thing in their fantasy life and another in their physical sexual explorations, not to mention all of the sexual activity that takes places in the middle ground, in the realm of fantasy and flirtation, online and offline. I would be far more inclined to believe that your motivations in producing this project were in advancing new ways of thinking about how porn affects our sex lives if you had given any airtime at all to porn outside the straight, gonzo, hardcore genre — which is just one genre of porn, and not the most popular or most widely available — that you narrowly focus on.
Bottom line, I just don’t see much sense locating the blame for deficient sex ed with the porn industry, the vast majority of which never claimed to put quality sex education over moving product. I can see you want your project to reach men and women struggling with how to articulate their desires, and yet what comes across the screen falls flat. The sexual information you offer is so vague as to be misleading, and you offer no links to other sex educators. There are a lot of them online (check my links), and they have devoted their professional careers to increasing the public’s sexual literacy. On a lighter note, you don’t even offer links to any porn you think is doing an okay job — since you say you do like porn, I’d love to know your recommendations and I’m sure those producers would love the business.
What I come away from the site with is feeling shamed into agreeing with you, not approached as if I am an intelligent, capable woman who wants to have better sex and could use the tools you provide to better communicate with my partner. Instead, you offer users/readers a half dozen over-simplified sexual factoids and an open-ended box into which they can complain about porn. I’m not sure how that helps anybody, except you, to get attention for something a lot of people are too titillated about to think cleary about to begin with.
Melissa - I appreciate your taking the time to respond to me too. I’d really like to talk to you in more depth about this - can I ask where you’re based? I’d love to meet face to face to discuss. The site at the moment is in a very nascent state, literally launched in its most minimal form yesterday, and you touch on a number of things I am keen to expand to going forwards - it would be great and very helpful to be able to engage in a practical, live dialogue re your input. Do let me know - many thanks.
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[...] has been keeping tabs on fancy-pants tech conference TED, where fancy-pants tech gurus are discussing…porn. Of course they are. Specifically, they’re discussing the new website Make Love Not Porn, [...]