The Lust Issue
Gushing
Getting candid with sexpert Jane Fader
The Lust Issue
Published: February 9, 2011
MT: What about Twitter, does it lend itself to lusty endeavors?
Fader: It's all about the seedy underworld of direct messaging, baby. Oh my god. I've challenged people to draw pictures of what they believe the underworld of Twitter direct messaging looks like. No one has taken me up on it. What about Skype? I find Skype to be very erotic. I just found a picture of myself taken while I was talking to my boyfriend when I was in Paris. It was a really intense photo screen capture. There's this look in my eyes. We weren't doing anything sexual, but the look in the photo tells a different story. Skyping is something I find people do in private. I never had any erotic exchanges on MySpace.
MT: And on the topic of erotic exchanges, let's talk about Teledildonics.
Fader: Yes, lets! Have you ever read Howard Rheingold's Teledildonics? It's a beautiful and short essay from a 1991 issue of Mondo Magazine in which he kind of contextualizes the relationships between sex, technology, contemporary culture and social media. I was assigned to research teledildonics in a class on cyber culture. It was a theory-heavy class and Rheingold is a social theorist who was the first person to use the term teledildonics. He's just a really brilliant guy who lectures at U.C.-Berkeley. Unlike female ejaculation, sex with robots was not unimaginable or inconceivable me. Discovering that Detroit used to be a leading logging boomtown in the nation was, however, like learning about female ejaculation. Detroit's logging industry is to female ejaculation what the auto industry is to orgasm.
MT: You've been tracking sex and sexuality for a year on your website and have studied various realms of the subject for consecutive years prior. What've you learned about yourself?
Fader: That I'm rebellious, and that I like to be rebellious. I go against the grain. Let's say I like to have sex in the missionary position. Is that because I'm enjoying my own oppression in a position that's more pleasing for the man, because I want him to be pleased? And if I do enjoy that, should I rebel from that because I'm naturally inclined to do so? And If I know I'm naturally inclined to be rebellious, should I rebel against that? Or should I be bad then, and allow myself to be put in missionary position and get that double pleasure from being bad in the sense that I'm going against myself? It's this whole post-feminist stuff. Would I be betraying� myself to not get spanked because getting spanked is not feminist? What if I like it?
MT: So there's an internal battle between submitting to feminism or submitting to lust?
Fader: Yes, politics and pleasure pull at each other but I know that my politics do not align with my pleasure. And why should it, really? Why do I have to politicize my pleasure? If I'm a feminist in the bedroom, does that make me politically active? There's no place for feminist politics when my mouth is being fucked. I'm not out to fight for wages or battle pro-lifers. If I masturbate and talk about it in stupid YouTube videos, does that make me a feminist? If so, is that something I even want?
Fader's articles, ideas, projects and sex toy review videos can be found at janefader.com. All photos are from The Jane Show by Jef Bourgeau; detroitmona.com.
Travis R. Wright is Metro Times arts & culture editor. Send comments to twright@metrotimes.com.
> Email Travis R. Wright
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