OTAKU MAnKO: Sex Ed, Technology and the Six-Foot Pussy
Twice a year, I am one of about a dozen instructors who, with the help of guest speakers, teach a 60-hour four-weekend class on sex for San Francisco Sex Information, a nonprofit educational service that answers peoples’ sex questions by phone and email and occasionally (as in the case of events like the Folsom Street Fair) in person. The purpose of the training is to educate the phone (and now internet) volunteers in sex information, communication and sex-positivity, so they can offer accurate, free, anonymous, nonjudgemental sex information. SFSI has been operating since 1972, so the training has graduated literally thousands of people, and many prominent sex educators from the SF Bay Area and around the world have taken the training and/or served as guest lecturers.
I’ve been involved with the organization since I first took the training in the spring of 1993. In those days, technology was a critical part of the training. I and my fellow trainees were presented with a very clear promise-cum-warning on the first day by the training coordinators Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence: This is a multimedia class; you will hear lectures, you will see explicit images, you will watch pornography. There will be no live demos, but you’ll see and hear about more variations of the human sexual mind and body than you probably knew existed. Watching pornography and seeing explicit images may be a new experience for you (it wasn’t for me) and watching it in this context may “bring up some issues” for you (it did).
That initial SFSI training was the single most important educational experience of my life. I learned more in fiftyish hours at SFSI than I’d learned in three years in the esteemed classrooms of The University of California, Santa Cruz. That isn’t because I was sexually naïve (I wasn’t — though straight, I had been professionally writing gay leather porn for several years at that point), nor because the information itself was entirely new to me (some of it was and some of it wasn’t). What made this different is that it used technology to present all available media. For me, college lectures always equaled naptime. At SFSI, we heard lectures and panel discussions, had discussions in small breakout groups, saw still images both medical and explicit, and watched movies — many of them porn. SFSI training in 1993 was a parade of technology at its best.
I can be forgiven if I acknowledge that this is a little in-joke, as anyone reading this who happens to have been through SFSI training around that time will probably understand. As a nonprofit operating on a shoestring, SFSI in 1993 relied on equipment that was, even then, shockingly retro. The charts, graphs and other still images were handwritten on posterboard or shown by slide projector. The movies — most of them “sexual patterning films” directed a sex ed pioneer named Laird Sutton — were projected on a white wall from an 8mm projector that flickered and whirred like a steampunk fetish item. Add scurrying rodents, a guy named Vinnie at the door and a few choice aromas, and it coulda been 42nd Street circa 1972, only with lots more tattooed new age guys and bisexual chicks.
When in our third weekend the staff unleashed the “Fuckarama,” wherein trainees were shown an overwhelming array of pornography with the use of perhaps a dozen slide projectors and another dozen 8mm film projectors showing everything from ’20s stag films to Deep Throat to video-era porn flicks, the only thing that kept the sound of whirring machinery from deafening us was the sound that dominated it — Led Zeppelin’s “A Whole Lotta Love” at top volume. I ask you: Can the University of California compete with that?
In case you haven’t noticed, there was a technological revolution since then (actually, there’s been one going on pretty much nonstop since the steam engine, or maybe since agriculture) and today’s tech doesn’t look much like the tech SFSI used in 1993. Late in that first training I took, the organization received a donated video projector the size of a portable dishwasher; the six or eight media staff members required to move it up and down the stairs of the training space affectionately remember it as “The Widowmaker.” This training, SFSI was able to acquire a new projector for less than $700, and it’s roughly the size of a laptop computer. We show excerpts of DVDs from Comstock Films, Blowfish Video and Maria Beatty rather than Laird’s films on 8mm, but the intention is the same: to learn about how people have sex, it is important (or can be) to see people having sex.
That’s one of the reasons pornography is so important. Laird’s films were created for educational purpose, and in conjunction with nonprofit enterprises. There were no apologies made for any titillation offered — but that wasn’t the point. The films of Shine Louise Houston, Tony Comstock and Maria Beatty are created, quite gleefully, for the purpose of getting you turned on, but they are at once porn and something else — or maybe porn is, or can be, at once porn and something else. And that something else is education.
For all its failings — and oh, it has so, so many — the pornography market allows one to see other people having sex, which can be a critical component of understanding how other people have sex. You might not get a realistic impression of everyday sex even from the most artful or sex-positive porn. You certainly won’t get it from Nasty Sluts #37. But you’ll see people having sex, all right, and that’s a fine place to start.
Porn provides tools for sex educators in a profound and concrete way. This past weekend when I gave 30-minute lecture on oral sex with author Violet Blue — (kind of a dream job, if you ask me), I looked through the lecture notes and saw a hastily-jotted trainer comment about the oral sex lecture from the last training:
“why not slides? WE NEED A SIX-FOOT PUSSY!!!“
One of my fellow trainers, who shall remain anonymous, wished Violet and I to pantomime cunnilingus techniques on a projected poontang, to par-tay with a Powerpoint prong. Violet and I thought it was a great idea.
Know where I found these colossal friendlies to cut-and-paste into our slides? Porn, where else?
Gives new meaning to the term “learning tools.”
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 at 11:14 am Sex Ed, Technology and the Six-Foot Pussy « Skid Roche wrote:
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