The Price of Sexual Fame

This isn't a personal narrative. I'm not someone with sexual fame. I'm in the fortunate position of being able to write for millions of people each month and still maintain control over what I write and how I write it. And I do it with relative anonymity (relative at least to About.com's monthly traffic).

When I refer to sexual fame I'm referring to a select few. Not people who are famous for having sex (there's more than a few of those) but people who have achieved a level of notoriety for talking about sex. The few who are regularly quoted in national print media, who are guests on talk shows, who end up with television shows of their own. The "sex experts" who are deemed safe enough to appear on national morning TV, the ones who appear scientific enough to be quoted by journalists who usually don't understand the science their reporting on.

These folks don't always live the glamorous life you'd imagine they do. Being quoted in the New York Times doesn't actually pay (although if you've got a good agent, it can be parlayed into money in other ways). But they do have a disproportionate influence on public discourse about sex, and on how stories eventually get presented by the media, and it's these people who are cited by so many of the regular people who email me with questions about why they aren't "normal" sexual beings. As a result, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about who these people are, and how they got to be in the position they are.

It's interesting to think about which voices garner the most attention and have access to the biggest audiences. Why is it that the same people end up always quoted in national print media even for stories where they aren't the most qualified people to speak on a given subject? How come certain people end up as guests, or hosts, on national television programs, speaking to millions of viewers at a time, while others communicate their sexual messages in relative obscurity?

One way I've come to think about this is in terms of compromise. In my experience, the bigger the audience you have, the more you have to compromise. You can't have a best selling book or be on Oprah if you're message is one that's complicated enough to reflect the lived experience of more than one group of people. At least not when it comes to sexuality. In order to attain that level of fame and that size of audience and still not be run out of town for talking about sex, you have to compromise your message.

It may not feel like compromise to many of the people who already have that level of notoriety. If your understanding of sexuality is uncomplicated, then going on national television and promising that your sex toy/lube/website is guaranteed to give people orgasms seems like a reasonable thing to do. If your understanding of sexuality is uncritical then it's easy to talk about sexuality and pretend you're including everyone, when you're really just talking about middle class, non-disabled, white, heterosexual folks. If you believe that regardless of how much you get paid or the size of your audience, your only responsibility is to yourself, then what's the problem in speaking to millions of people in a way that ignores most of them and tells the rest of them that if they aren't like you, there's something wrong with them?

My premise, of course, is an old one; that we have an ethical responsibility to everyone else on the planet, and that responsibility isn't static, but tied the the kind of power we hold (think Uncle Ben, or, you know, Jesus). As far as I'm concerned, when you have a soapbox that's tall enough to allow you to see much of the planet, you have an ethical responsibility to try and speak to the diversity of the group you're actually speaking to, and not talk to us as if we're all the same. It's a difficult task, one that I fail at regularly. But we should try.

Why am I thinking about this stuff today? Well actually I think about it everyday. But today's inspiration was this post from The Frisky, announcing that clued-out journalist turned sexual memoirist Mara Altman has a development deal with HBO for her one-young-woman's-quest-for-an-orgasm memoir that came out a few years ago. It's news that could be depressing. After all, while HBO produces some of the smartest and sexiest TV, when they deal with sex directly (as in their ironically titled series "Real Sex") the results are almost always terrible. And every encounter I've had with Altman as a reader tells me that she's the kind of person who will do little of value with any sexual fame she achieves. The quality and character of Altman's understanding of sexuality might be best summarized by the quote she gave Deadline Hollywood, "It's not everyday that a dysfunctional vulva gets to move out of marginalization and into the limelight." Sigh.

It's a long way from a development deal to a green-lit series, but there's still hope. If the show does get picked up, depending on who ends up with the power to approve scripts, a show about trying to have orgasms could be amazing in spite of Altman. Power is tricky that way.