Carol Queen

by Carol Queen PhD

Good Vibrations Staff Sexologist

Good Vibrations is not part of the Tumblr community—but just about all of our friends seem to be. From many of our blogger colleagues, to queer porn creators like Pink & White Productions, to the library and archives of the Center for Sex & Culture, Tumblr has been a home for many people who want to communicate their intense interest in (especially) alternative forms of porn and carry on other discussions about adult topics. We stand by them as they mourn—and rage about—the decision made by Tumblr’s owners to severely limit the sexual content of the site’s creators and curators. This action seeks to shame and marginalize sex-positive people, and its effect will be to disconnect community.

The Tumblr announcement came the same week as a decision by Facebook to police suggestive content was announced. “Mentioning sexual roles, sex positions, fetish scenarios, sexual preference/sexual partner preference…” as well as other content is banned under its updated Terms of Service. I don’t know about you, but I can’t do my job (much less have fun on the weekend) if I can’t talk about that stuff. There’s debate online and off as to whether the Tumblr ban was inspired by SESTA/FOSTA, but broad agreement that Facebook’s ban most likely was.

SESTA/FOSTA, which stands for Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act & Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, is a law passed in April 2018 that seeks to make internet platforms responsible for content they host that allows human trafficking to be carried out via these websites on these platforms. There are already laws against trafficking and many of its constituent activities. But the law passed nonetheless, and immediately began to impact the internet. No one in the adult industry thinks that trafficking is OK, but beyond that, it immediately became clear that the people with power—the government, the platforms themselves—could not tell the difference between coerced/forced sex (which is the component of trafficking SESTA/FOSTA really tries to go after) and consent-based sex work. From webcamming to prostitution, this law, and the bans that follow, hits sex workers especially hard.

How? Aside from street-based prostitution, these days most sex workers’ client- and fan-seeking happens online. Via platforms like Tumblr and many others, sex workers can put themselves out there, showcase their creative work, meet and–-most importantly—screen clients, and carry on with some level of safety. That’s at risk every time their community, and communications, are disrupted by bans like these. Many such disruptions have happened, across many platforms, since April, and sex work has gotten less safe.

We stand with the sex workers who are getting caught in the political crossfire as activists and politicians who do not know or care about their lives legislate away their hard-won online space and their safety.

It is bad enough that US (and many other countries’) politics is currently conducted in a way that disenfranchises and dismisses the interests and perspectives of many groups of people. Three of the communities hardest hit by this weaponized political polarization–the LGBTQ community, women, and sex workers—are among those most impacted by Tumblr’s policy change. (And it adds unconscionable insult to injury that Tumblr’s “go clean or go home” policy is being rolled out today of all days–on December 17, the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.)

Beyond the sorry state of our politics, we are outraged that Internet platforms, from social media to search engines, seem more prone these days to accept content steeped in hate and intolerance than that inspired by a playful or searching interest in sex. They call the former “free speech” while damning the latter as harmful—when in reality, it’s the other way around. Some of the world’s largest—and certainly most powerful—companies are shifting the cultural ground under everyone’s feet. Movements and communities that have grown for decades are under enormous pressure as search engines and social media companies put a heavy thumb on the scale. This is unacceptable—and dangerous. And it’s bad business for companies to pull the rug out from under their own users and make individuals’ and communities’ existence more precarious—Tumblr itself might not be as huge as some, but it’s owned by Verizon, and no one argues that Facebook and Google don’t control vast swaths of Internet territory. But these businesses will get away with exiling sexuality-based cultures if we don’t speak up. We need to loudly say that we don’t want the platforms we use to engineer the sexuality community—and ordinary people who are just curious or charmed by the content they generate—off to the margins.

We stand with the sexy and sex-positive content creators of Tumblr.

Good Vibrations is part of the Free Speech Coalition (disclosure: Staff Sexologist Carol Queen PhD is a past FSC board member, and owner Joel Kaminsky currently sits on their board). Their statement on the Tumblr ban is eloquent:

1.       What led you to become a sex educator?

I was a sexuality activist in the 1970s and ‘80s, and back then it was pretty hard to imagine that could be a professional identity.  I didn’t really want to be a sex therapist, the only other thing I’d heard of. But the AIDS crisis was getting bad, and I accompanied my girlfriend to look at college catalogs at the University of Oregon library, and there it was: a catalog from a school that specialized in sexology (the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality). All we could do about HIV/AIDS in those days was teach about safer sex, and that’s what I thought I was gearing up to do. But then I got completely bitten by the sexology bug, via IASHS,  San Francisco Sex Information, Good Vibrations, the Lusty Lady, and everyplace else I encountered sexual diversity and issues. Clearly I was in this because I was supposed to be here! Then I began writing about sexuality and that clinched it.

2.       What advice do you wish you had been given as a young adult?

That I didn’t have to wait for “a job”—that I could not only engage in (unpaid) activism, I could figure out how to do what I cared about entrepreneurially. In fact, when people want to be sex educators, that’s practically required, because there are fewer jobs than people who want to do this work.

3.       Looking back over the last 25 years at GV, what is your favorite memory?

Oh, that’s a hard question! So many to choose from. It was so exciting when we became a worker-owned co-op in the early ‘90s (and of course we did not clearly see what that would mean on the ground, or any difficulties to come). I had great times doing clip shows and helping develop what would become our first film production arm, Sexpositive Productions. It was amazing when Down There Press, which we then owned, published Exhibitionism for the Shy. Helping run the Erotic Reading Circle was amazing—I still remember the story that made me want to edit Sex Spoken Here (which I did with our wonderful colleague Jack Davis). But my VERY fave memory is helping an elderly woman buy a vibrator (a Magic Wand, naturally). She said she didn’t want to live her entire life without knowing what an orgasm felt like. That was an amazing interaction.

4.       What is the most interesting thing that you have learned as a sexologist?

That you can never, ever feel you know all about human sexuality, no matter how much you study and experience. There is always more to it, and erotic possibility is so diverse as to be almost endless. Every time you think you have it figured out, someone will come along and confide their own fetish or fantasy and it’s mind-blowing all over again.

5.       What are you currently working on?

I have finished up a big, big book with my longtime friend Shar Rednour: The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone. And my family has started a collaboration on a new project, getting my partner Robert Morgan Lawrence’s work on the anatomy and neurology of sensation into book form at long last. I rely on his knowledge and theories every day! We’re working with our partner Dina Fayer on that book. AND my erotic stories are in the process of getting collected to be published in one volume—25 years of erotica. (After that? More essays, then I’ll start a memoir at some point, and I’m still going to do an anthology about the Rocky Horror Picture Show and how it changed our ideas about sex and gender possibilities!)

6.       What project or work accomplishment are you most proud of?

I am really proud to have been able to help hold Good Vibrations history and shape its future—without this job, I have no clue what my life would have been like! On the page, I am extremely grateful to have found the space to be an essayist. I love love love writing erotica, but there’s something about the essay format that just deeply resonates with me, and I‘m super-proud of PoMoSexuals (which I co-edited with Lawrence Schimel) and glad to have Real Live Nude Girl out in print. That’s in the book-iverse, and on the streets, absolutely it’s the Center for Sex & Culture, a really unique project that Robert and I started 17 years ago without knowing what exactly it would become, and it has turned into such a wonderful community space.

7.       How did you find out about Good Vibrations/how did you start working there?

I met Joani Blank, GV’s founder, at a Betty Dodson workshop! I think it was in 1988. Months later she called me and offered me a one-day-a-week job which has morphed into the most extraordinary career. I have now been here—this is mind-blowing to me—longer than Joani was. It just goes to show: You can network anywhere!

8.       What are some ways in which the culture of sex-positivity has changed in your last 25+ years with Good Vibrations?

When I started this job in 1990 the term sex-positive was decidedly underground. You would not have heard it anywhere in the media, except maybe in queer and sex community contexts—never mainstream. Now people have run with it (such that I had to write a slightly cranky essay on what it is—so many people have the wrong idea about its definition!) and it is out of the corral, for sure.

Your question makes me think of two things: First, the way the 1990s, the decade when sex-positivity really came into its own, saw a really large surge in diverse publishing about sex. Even before the Internet was a Big Thing, lots of books and zines were being created; now, of course, it’s more likely to be blogs and websites. When GV got its start in the 1970s there were fewer than a dozen books on the shelf;  publishing about sex was just exponential.

The other thing: When I began, there were two main ways to be a sex educator: You could do it from a health perspective (Planned Parenthood or HIV education, for instance), or it could be more academic, like college sex ed or sexuality studies (and there wasn’t a ton of the latter yet). The people who emerged from sexuality community to teach were mostly just showing up, though Betty Dodson had been doing it for 20 years already, and a few people from the BDSM community for nearly that long (Patrick Califia, for instance). But the many “sexperts” who have come on the scene were only just emerging, and Robert and I were among early traveling sex educators who’d teach a class pretty much anywhere, from a bookstore to a bar. There are many, many more such people now, and young people decide they want to pursue this as a career much earlier than most anyone in my cohort knew that might be a possibility.

9.       Of all the places that you could be, what keeps you with Good Vibrations?