“You know you spend way too much time looking at internet porn when you Google ‘cream pies’ and are surprised when the top results are all recipes for banana-and-chocolate cream pies,” writes Audacia Ray, whose book Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration hits stores Friday.
Ray interviewed more than 80 women, a wide selection of bloggers, chatters, daters, models, geeks and non-geeks. What she found is perhaps not all that surprising but you won’t hear it on the evening news: Women have wide-ranging sexual interests and are savvy enough to figure out how to harness technology to pursue our erotic desires — and occasionally make some money doing it.
Naked on the Internet (Seal Press) is a serious look at how women are incorporating the internet into sex, and while the occasional wry comment and the deft use of individual stories leavens the academic tone, they don’t undermine the gravity of the work.
Most interesting to me is how Ray includes sex workers as legitimate voices in the changing realm of female sexuality. The internet itself has changed sex work significantly, but it has also brought more women into the field, many of whom don’t think of themselves as “sex workers.” If you model fetishy outfits once or twice a year for cash to spend on a new tattoo, are you a sex worker? If you dance naked on webcam in an adult community but don’t get paid for it, are you a sex worker, an erotic artist or both? (more. . . )
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For Audacia’s upcoming book tour appearances, please check out the right hand sidebar.