audacia ray is also naked on the internet

Today is my day on the virtual juggernaut that is Audacia Ray's online book tour for her new book.

I cannot write about Audacia Ray’s new book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, without slavishly reproducing the quote that seems to be on everyone’s web page: in her introduction, Ray claims, “I wave my nerd flag high—I’m curious and a bit obsessive when it comes to information, especially about sex.” It’s not unusual—and I intend no litotes there—that Ray’s book should serve as exemplar to all three parts of that sentence: her avowed nerdiness, informational obsession and interest in sex.

When I first started blogging a couple of years ago, a few voices stood apart from the rest. One of them was Ray’s. Smart, sexy, goofy and unashamed of making the bad pun, Ray possesses a voice that is remarkably easy on the brain, even as it challenges the reader to think. While Ray’s book is not of the “you’ve-loved-the-blog-now-read-the-book” genre, she does maintain much of the same style of writing, interjecting her analysis with her favorite superlative (“awesome”), her favorite low-rent expletive (“darn”), and her naming subchapters with phrases like “It’s Virtual Reality, Dude” and “A Blog of One’s Own.”

This style makes Ray’s book highly readable and charming when you feel like it should be boring you to tears. Chapters that should go down like flat diet Fresca become easy to chug-a-lug because of the nearly visceral presence of the writer on the page. And Ray’s unapologetic employment of her own personality means that as I read the book, I absorbed a fantastic amount of information—remember the “obsessive” part—without really being aware of doing so. Which is, for me, always a plus when I’m reading something I might not be entirely engrossed by on its own merits, and  I have to admit that the topic of this book did not inspire me to great eagerness.

Ray’s book looks at how women use the Internet to explore, record, research, commodify and connect with their own sexualities. It begins with a cursory history of women and the Internet, the fraught starting point of chicks online, and then tours through the fields of online dating, sex blogging, independent online porn, sex workers online, online health forums and finishes with a look at cyberdildonics. For me, two chapters—the one dealing with sex workers and the one on cyberdildonics—stood out from the rest, though for reasons different from one another.

Because I’m somewhere between friend and acquaintance with Ray, and because I read her blog and see her socially, I knew that her strong intellectual interest and her advocacy centers on sex workers. Not only does Ray publish the not-for-profit $pread Magazine, a magazine by and for sex workers, but she also recently earned her MA from Columbia, writing her thesis on the middle-class sex worker. Her chapter on sex workers in Naked on the Internet illustrates Ray’s interest in, commitment to, knowledge of and compassion toward women who provide sex for money.  It’s a topic fairly unknown to me and Ray effectively relates how the Internet has changed the way that women who are sex workers find their dates, research them, and create a sense of community online. This chapter was fascinating and showed Ray’s depth of knowledge of and her commitment to this still very maligned  group of people.

As unfamiliar as I am with escorting, I’m equally unfamiliar with the field of cyberdildonics—that strange sci-fi melding of sex and flesh and machine—and in part my unfamiliarity made reading this chapter feel like I was being a glimpse of a strange futuristic sex-wonderland. More than that, however, two other points really made this chapter for me. First, in it Ray really gives free rein to her voice, and she is often just plain funny. Writing about the  rogue folks who make sex toys out of blenders and power-drills, Ray asserts, “Commonly called fucking machines by people not known for mincing words, these toys are indiscreet contraptions that exist somewhere on the spectrum between terrifying and orgasm inducing.” It’s just one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of the fuck machine, and I have to hand it to her.

However, the main reason why I found this chapter really helpful was the way that Ray chose to put men and women in a side-by-side relationship in her analysis of the topic. One of my main issues with feminist writing is that it so often treats women like they are in a vacuum. And even while I understand the political reason for this choice—it puts emphasis on the woman, rather than treating men as the default setting—I always end up wondering, ok, but how is the way that chicks do X different from the way that dudes do it? In the cyberdildoncis chapter, Ray raises both men’s fascination with/fear of machines and women’s interest in/apprehension of machines work in relationship to one another, and so at the end of the chapter, I felt both enlightened and mollified.

I can’t say I feel entirely thumbs up about the book as a whole. Naturally, I have a great interest in the chapter called “A Day in the Life of My Vagina,” which centers on sex blogging. As fabulous as the chapter’s name is, the contents of it fail to live up to the moniker. I didn’t read this chapter and come away with any greater knowledge about sex blogging, and as someone who writes a blog with, if not occasionally about, sex, I was disappointed. It felt very anecdotal and not quite analytic enough. I would like to see the kind of writing I’m doing subjected to analysis, and not treated like it’s only worthy of a gentle narrative.

That said, the book is damn fine, and even sometimes awesome. Closing the back cover, I found myself in the position of being both proud of knowing a person like Audacia Ray and slightly envious of her achievements. A book like this stands as testament to its writer's fierce intelligence, wicked humor and genial nerdiness. More than that, it bodes well for the future. With women like Audacia Ray writing books like these, we live in a brave new world indeed.

Comments

[Ruby]

I just ordered this book and can't wait to read it. I *heart* sexy nerdy women:)

Great review, btw. Very balanced and honest.

[Alana]

Damn, third blogger this week to review this book. Must have it, right? :-)

[dirty filthy princess]

Sounds great! I might have to get that one.

[Ceara]

Totally unrelated to this post - although I always appreciate adding (yet another!) book to my (entirely too huge) wishlist - here's a crazy idea.

I adore your writing, and have been reading for a long while now. An online friend of mine has started a choose-your-own-adventure blog crawl, which as a geek I thought was potentially enormous fun -- I don't suppose you'd be at all interested in adding an entry?

It's in its infancy. Here's the beginning: Adventure Chosen

I know this is odd, but I really enjoy your writing and thought of you; figured you MIGHT find it entertaining. :)