Sex From the Expert

With her doctorate in sexology, her extensive experience as an activist, performer, explicit and educational writer and film-maker, and her overall joyful and insightful approach to sex and people, Carol Queen is the most authoritative authority on sex I`ve met. She is currently the staff sexologist for Good Vibrations and co-founder of the still-in-development Center for Sex and Culture, which is going to be so cool when it opens. Recently she let me waste an hour of her precious time to ask about, er, sex. You commented in a past interview that the `90s was in some ways a good decade for sexuality but not so hot in others. Could you comment a bit on some current trends you`re seeing or anything that`s particularly bugging you? You know, there are things that are bugging me recently, but, for one thing, I really see that the mass culture has largely continued what was going on in the nineties with larger visibility opportunities for sexuality. The film industry has put out a few, especially independent, movies lately [like Brown Bunny or Secretary] on pretty challenging, pretty sexual topics : People are always interested in sex to some degree, the difference culturally is whether mainstream and independent outlets feel they can take the risk that may be associated with a sexual focus, and do consumers feel like, `yes, it`s perfectly ok for me to be into all this`? The dawning years of the new millennium are certainly continuing this way from a pop culture perspective. From a state perspective, from a control perspective, the culture wars are certainly heating back up. We`re looking at a situation that`s maybe more like it was in the early nineties when sex came up from underground and folks were really cranky about it. Then for a few years they were kind of quiet and focused all their crankiness on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky`s underwear, and now they`re like, ok, what are we going to take a pot shot at first? I think we`ve got in the administration now a group of people who haven`t made a big issue yet about sex, but if all the terrorism business which has occupied them for the last few years had not come along we would have already seen them try to chill down the sexual speech, and I believe we will see them do that. There are people trying to fight them on that, there are people who believe it`s a civil liberties issue, and there are people who think that, `hey, it`s my right to put on my TV show whatever I want; so you`re a capitalist, I`m a capitalist, shut up!` So that`s one of the things that I think is really big right now. And the other thing I rant about a lot is that the one really not very bright spot throughout the `90s has been the kind of sex education youth get. It did not keep pace with the content on cable TV, to put it mildly, and I really think that this would be a safer, better, saner culture if it, as a culture, took that on, rather than letting 18 year olds loose who do or don`t know that they need that education : Virtually all young people have a sense that the information they got about sex was bogus, wasn`t all that useful. Either the teacher and whoever else did the education were acutely uncomfortable or [the kid] can tell that they weren`t saying everything and young people with some cultural view can see it`s a cultural issue. Many college students these days are drawn to working in the sex industry. You worked awhile at the Lusty Lady peep shows and have made explicit educational videos and such. What are your thoughts about college students working in the sex industry? Well, from the time that I was [at the Lusty Lady] in 1990, their ads on the back pages of the Guardian and the Weekly, have said `ideal job for a college student.` This is not totally common among stripper environments, but they always were keyed into the fact that many students need a flexible, part-time job, money`s pretty good, etc. When I think about students, or any 18 to 25 year old, deciding to explore the sex industry, I want them to have a pretty good understanding of their own sexuality and their own needs for extra information and what their boundaries are and where their support network is. All of those things are pretty crucial when working in the sex industry. It`s not always the case that young people get into the industry and find that it affects their feelings about themselves sexually and sex in general, but it can happen, and the less information and positive sexual outlook the person has, the greater the potential problem.

The sex industry is not for everybody, and sometimes I think, `wow, jeez, this has gotten a little hipper than I even thought it would!` I certainly feel like, say, the student body at Berkeley, which at least has access to the great communication-skills-building and informative experience of femsex and male sexuality has a bit of an extra buffer when it comes to navigating how intense it is to do sexual entertainment for money. It is intense, and nobody trains us for this. I know that some feminists would say that the whole entire culture trains us for this, but that`s such a surface insight. Once you get into the real work of it and the challenges of it, it can be enormously emotionally satisfying on some levels and it can be awful too, depending on the circumstances and what the person brings into it. There`s no way of screening for that, and if there were it would be illegal, right? I encourage people to stay on a learning curve the whole entire time. If you think of it as field work, it`s a whole different perspective from thinking of it as something that is in you, whether positively or negatively, and you learn extraordinary things about what the culture does to commodify and control sexuality. Do you think there are significant differences for workers in different aspects of the industry-fetish work versus stripping, for example? Well, there are lots of people in those industries who feel that there are pretty major gulfs between what they do and what other people do and I think it`s worth discussing it to make those sorts of differentiations, but I also know that most people`s moms will freak out just about as much about one thing as about the other thing. When you go back home for your best friend`s wedding, everybody asks what you`re doing and you get a sense of how freaked out people are, from modeling naked to stripping to prostitution; it`s such a wide range of different activities but the cultural stigma is pretty similar from the outside. The differences between these things are great and [yet there`s] the similarity of exposing yourself of some level, being sexualized : even if you`re tying guys dicks in knots and whipping them, you`ve still got to wear a sexy outfit: We live in a culture that wants all women to be sexy and then demonizes them when they are and that hasn`t changed, not really, any one who has had the least little bit of sex industry experience and then goes out and tries to find a partner from among non-sex industry savvy people understands what she is up against - the assumptions and the labeling. It`s challenging enough to have any kind of relationship without adding that kind of stuff on top.