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?).
