A Book Experience
Something like a review of Samantha Cole's How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.
This article was originally written for Quants Magazine and published in Italian. The English audio version is available behind the paywall at the bottom of this post.
In How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex, Samatha Cole makes connections across the history of computing as we know it. From the earliest computer dating systems to Bumble, the Communications Decency Act to FOSTA/SESTA, and jennicam.com to Twitch.TV.
I was largely homeschooled, like Cole was. The internet was a way for me to socialise, especially after repeated family relocations for my dad’s job. The internet was a way for me to see what life might be like in other places, for other people. And it allowed me to find others who were into the stuff I was into—cats, science fiction, and, not so eventually, sex. The internet is how I met several significant friends, many sexual partners, and a career’s worth of creative collaborators. The internet is how I built my career, first in pornography and then in writing about sexuality, and my understanding of how people engage with each other. For me, How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex was often a trip down memory lane. For you, it might be a historical tour through the intangible, and fading, early online world. Helpful pop ups—reminiscent of Microsoft’s Clippy—define terms throughout the book, and footnotes help situate the practices of sexual services online within the norms of business, online and off, of each era.
Separation of Mind and Body
It starts with a quote from Lambda MOO player legba, saying “… looks don’t matter and only the best writers get laid.” Cole describes a text based connection to society, and relationships conducted solely through desktop, then laptop, computers. She delineates ‘meatspace’ from cyberspace, saying “What sat in the computer chair was just flesh.” Minitel users in France are a notable exception, though they seemed to consider choices of style worth more regard than luck of gene expression. Later, describing the “porous mesh” boundary between Second Life and the tangible world, we might question whether this boundary has changed, or our perception of separation has been wrong all along.
We often discuss our minds and our bodies as distinct entities, whether the discussions are philosophical, theological, or casual. We may understand, in theory, that our thinking is affected by, and has effects on, our physical state. But we seek to separate our thoughts from our form, online from off, and who we are from what we look like.
Not a Utopia
In many forums and chat rooms, the compound question of “a/s/l,” requesting age, sex, and location, could be avoided. A person could be judged entirely on the content of what they wrote. If they chose to reveal demographic specifics—background, age, profession—that was their right. But these things weren’t required. Our identities weren’t attached to photos, to legal names, to Facebook pages tracking our entire young- and fully-adult histories. Some feelings of utopia stemmed from the anonymity, the perception of escape from prejudices based on visual cues. Other causes of that heady hope involved accurate expectations of the advances in science and technology that this kind of global communication could contribute to.
Stacy Horn, commenting on her time running the EchoNYC BBS, which was founded in 1989, said to Cole “It was a shock to me, too, the extent of how much it wasn’t a utopia.” Dr. Angela Jones, author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, is quoted much later in the book saying “The camming industry is not a utopian paradise. It is an exploitative capitalist marketplace that also reproduces White supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, cissexism, and ableism.”
The internet was built by humanity. It inevitably collects and displays both our best and bleakest parts. The truism that our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses illustrates a porous boundary between function and foible. That same blur exists between mind and body, between society on the internet and off. There is no true separation. It all bleeds into each other. Not even a linear spectrum. No, it pours rain while the sun shines and birds chirp—everything at once. The internet is utopian and dystopian simultaneously, just like the world it connects.
Part of the Dystopia is the Censorship
Usenet’s alt.sex was almost soc.sex. Sexuality was almost categorised in the same group as culture, history, and politics. Instead, it was sent to the jokingly described as “anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists” branch—alt.* If the group of sexuality forums had been under a more reputable heading, it might not have flourished in the directions it did. Alt.sex.bondage’s discussions of what is and is not OK within a BDSM power dynamic are where part of my understanding of consent came from. Does this mean that I was fine without functional sex ed? No. Does this mean that any child should be accessing explicit content about sexuality without access to functional sex ed? Vehemently not. But the internet enabled conversations about sexuality, and thought about sexuality, that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and which I believe have had positive effects on our abilities to be gentle with each other.
Cole mentions Android’s autocorrect’s refusal to acknowledge several words that have to do with sexuality. As I type this into my Pages app, ‘camming’ and “cissexism” are underlined in dotted red to indicate that they are not in the application’s dictionary. During the first year of the pandemic, the instructor in a series of online courses I attended demonstrated the higher than usual error rate of Zoom’s auto transcriptions when the subject was sexual. On sites like OnlyFans, some words can be typed and others cannot, with no style guide circulated and rules which may change without notice. Val Webber, writing about suspension, is quoted as saying “There is a code of conduct for us to adhere to, but the rules are vague.”
The Financial Times’ Hot Money podcast traces some of this confusion up to the card companies, MasterCard and Visa. No one has the combination of desire and aptitude to take on the work of what is and is not ok, sexually speaking. The US government has declined (sigh, “I know it when I see it.”), and other nations have similarly ill-defined descriptions of what delineates obscenity, pornography, erotica, and other categories. MasterCard and Visa are left to navigate what, outside of illegal specifics, they’re willing to enable payments for, along with the expectations and moral leanings of shareholders. Visa was recently included in a lawsuit against PornHub, and their request to be removed from the suit was denied, and risks like these certainly factor into their decisions about who to allow payments to from their cards. There remains very little transparency about who makes distinctions between processable and not, or the details of what is and is not allowed. Even the extended guidelines of payment processors—based on their interpretations of the card companies’ rules—are vague to near opacity.
One word that was banned for some time on OnlyFans is “cervix.” If I attempted to send a message with that word, a pop up informed me that it was not allowed. A colleague received a violations notice about a video where she placed a camera inside her vagina to show a subscriber her cervix. Without any kind of notice or explanation, without my being aware of the change, “cervix” was taken off of the banned list—for typing. The ToS don’t say one way or the other regarding showing. In a space built on sexual fantasy, like so many portions of the internet, we are not able to speak of one of the largest components of our genitals. It’s another divide, between mind and meat.
New Exhibits
Cole writes that “Exhibitionism was becoming less about Madonna nude in a coffee table book and more everyday life on display.” With influencers, we now have a hybrid of both. Nude models and porn performers must attract attention (and therefore traffic) with influencer antics—video clips full of personality or incorporating rapidly shifting trends—and influencers often show skin to increase their brand’s visibility. A photo of myself in scant clothing performs better on Instagram and Twitter than a comparable photo where I’m wearing more. Given the garb of most influencers and adult stars in the majority of their posts, I assume peers have a similar experience. At the same time, the custom requests I received were often hypercasual. A normalcy that sometimes required performance, for its rarity in my life.
Cole describes the 2007 early days of justin.tv as having an energy of anticipation around the possible sexual interactions of titular streamer Justin. The platform quickly turned into a start-up, and eventually launched Twitch.tv. For every flashy E-girl, or speed runner of any gender, there’s a person who shows their sketching or animation process, or invites friends on to have winding conversations. We prefer to watch, though, over solely hearing. We are replicating meatspace in more visceral ways—the mundanity of it, the physical focus of it, and the visual experience of it. Rather than using the internet to access a different sort of world, with different values, we’ve made the internet into an ever more detailed reflection of our physical world.
In the lockdown phase of the pandemic, the internet became nearly everything. It was already a marketplace and the backbone of our financial lives. It was already the source of entertainment media for most of us. It became our connection to the world outside of essential jobs and essential errands, or illicit moments. The web was how we ordered supplies, delivered or packaged for curbside pickup. How we stayed in touch with each other, and tried to meet our needs for social engagement. How we went to school, sent our kids to school, taught school, or enjoyed having nothing to do with school. And, for some of us, how we conducted our spiritual lives. Where we used to move between two sections blurring into each other, we’re now living in a well-blended ombre of online to off.
The Next Page
No matter how the internet, and sexuality on it, continues to develop, Samantha Cole’s How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex will serve as a recounting of how we’ve come to where we are. How PayPal, Twitch, OnlyFans, OKCupid, and Tinder developed. The laws that affect who can do what on the web, and whether they can do it for money. Cole has continued covering sexuality online, including Louisiana’s new requirement that porn sites verify the age of viewers with government documentation. Consumers are—wisely, after nonconsensual billing by sites like xpics.com a few decades ago when asked for credit card information to verify age—reluctant to enter card details on unknown websites. They’re also wary of having their porn viewing habits tracked.
That said, something has to change. There must be a possible balance between making everything G-rated in subject matter and a free-for-all of the most complex parts of sexuality that humanity has to offer, sans context. Cases like xpics.com's scams requiring credit cards as age verification before billing unsuspecting users, outlined in Cole’s book, help us understand some of what has lead up to the debates occurring today. Other than working with the government—or manually verifying IDs over webcam, customer by customer—there don’t seem to be options that viewers would be willing to adopt. And the reach of educational material, often illogically subject to the same censorship as hardcore pornography, is too narrow to provide all the necessary context. Social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube find themselves in a similar, and presumably similarly unwanted, position of deciding what is and is not OK to distribute. Since before the dawn of the world wide web, we’ve been debating whether depictions of sexuality belong in society, or with the .alt* crowd. Cole’s book lays out the history, so we can come up with better ways next.