Badass Activist Friday presents: Cory Silverberg
It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to higlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.
Today’s Badass activist is Cory Silverberg. Cory is a certified sexuality educator, researcher and author, and he is the sexuality guide at About.com. He also serves on the board of ISIS, is the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability and conducts workshops on various topics surrounding sex.
I actually had the pleasure of meeting Cory in person at last spring’s Sex::Tech conference in San Francisco, and I can personally attest to the fact that he’s super awesome, and I’m excited that he agreed to do this interview with us. Here’s what he had to say:
You’re the “sexuality guide” at About.com. That’s pretty broad as far as job definitions go. How do you choose what topics to write about? Do you cover recent news events? Go where reader questions take you? Indulge your own curiosity?
It’s definitely all of the above. There are two main kinds of writing I do for About.com. What they call long form articles which mostly come from my curiosity and reader questions (and which, it should be said, aren’t actually very long), and blogging. Blogs are obviously even shorter, and those are almost always tied to something timely or from the news. One of the most amazing parts of my job with About.com is the editorial freedom they give me within my topic area which is just about as broad as you can get. I can write anything related to sexuality, which means in one week I might b reading research on erectile dysfunction, preparing for a 17-part series, while also reading a galley copy of African Sexualities: A Reader both for my own education and the possibility of reviewing it, and at the same time scanning news, and god help me, entertainment media for pop culture stories related to sexuality. I do all this while also reading a lot of what other people are writing online about sex, which is another source of inspiration. In terms of what gets published, I try to balance my writing so that readers who come to the site aren’t exposed to only one way of thinking about sex. So some of my articles respond to the pervasive medical modern approach to sexuality, other writing is more grounded in identity or social justice frameworks. And the best of it is a mix.
You’ve co-authored a book called The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability. How did you come to write that book? What do you think we can all learn from viewing sex through different lenses?
So as I think you know, I’m currently non-disabled, and the work I do around disability I usually do as an ally (although apropos of multiple lenses, I also come to the topic as a friend, partner, and family member). As someone who doesn’t have lived experience of disability it’s obviously very important to be mindful of how my voice may be, or may even appear to be, speaking for others, particularly others who tend to be silenced in conversations about sex. I wanted to say this because while I love thinking about different lenses we use to understand things through, I find myself talking about the lens of access more than the lens of disability, just to be really clear about what I’m representing and what I’m not. This stuff is so fraught, so I don’t mean to suggest there’s one way of doing this or talking about this. But I feel it’s important to at least try and explain how I do things, if I expect others to share how they do things with me.
The question about what we can all learn from anything is such a big one that I don’t think I’m really able to answer it briefly. For me, thinking about access – whether I’m writing or teaching or trying to have sex – means throwing out most of what I learned growing up and starting by considering some basic questions about bodies and desire. To think about access in something other than a token way requires us to challenge identity politics and to challenge our own experiences of both privelege and marginalization. Ultimately if my goal is to engage in pleasurable/entertaining/educational/meaningful exchanges with other people, access is the way to get there. I’m not sure if any of that makes sense. But I can also share that I find almost all mainstream, so-called comprehensive, sex education to be painfully exclusionary of both people with a wide range of experience of disability and also those of us for whom Disability and Deafness (both with intentional capital D’s) are a part of our lives.
About.com is an online service, but you also conduct in-person training for sex educators. What are some of the differences in your approach when it comes to online vs. in-person work?
In my experience, there’s no comparison when it comes to working online vs working in person. The experiences are fundamentally different. Being with people physically and being with people virtually can be equally powerful, painful, fun sexy, wierd, interesting, etc … But they sure aren’t the same experiences. But I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. I love doing bot. While they are different experiences as an educator I’m not sure my approach changes much.
In all my work the challenge for me is to offer people something substantial and meaningful, without requiring to define themselves any more than they want to I don’t think any of us should have to choose a gender, or orientation, or desire, or value in order to get support in thinking through our questions and experiences of sexuality. This is usually expected of course, “If I want the advice-columnist-sex-expert-vlogger to answer my question, I’m going to have to say my problem is X, and my experience is Y”. Dealing in absolutes is a trade off many make either out of necessity or because they happen to think in absolutes themselves. And it’s what allows a lot of people to say something coherent about sex in 400 words. I appreciate these kinds of exchanges but they don’t work for me. I don’t think that way, I don’t feel that way, and as a result there’s nothing I find interesting or satisfying about interacting with people in such an all-or-nothing way. That’s equally true online or in person. So I end up having to communicate differently in person vs. online, but the differences are more about techique than approach.
How do you feel, in general, that technology and the internet have impacted sexuality? I was born in the mid-80s, and I can barely remember not being online. The first thing I did when I started to question my sexuality was to go on Yahoo and search the topic, and I don’t know what I would have done if I had not been able to find support from the safety of my own room. At the same time, these developments in technology have also brought us the “sexting-panic” and relationships started and conducted entirely on Facebook, and there is more misinformation about sex on the internet than you can shake a stick at. So is it a mixed bag, or do you view it as an overall positive development?
I’d argue that technology is neutral. Of course it’s impact on our lives is anything but neutral. But computation technologies (whether we’re talking about mobile social networking, teledildonics or texting) cannot, I would argue, reasonably be said to be “good” or “bad”. I wouldn’t say this is true for all technology of course, but with most sex technologies I believe it is. I can’t spend too much time focusing on individual sex panics as a problem of a particular technology because there have been sex panics tied to technology probably since humans figured out how to produce fire (the stoneage headline read “Invention of Fire Brings More Outdoor Sex, Communities Scandalized”).
But there are plenty of questions I’m interested in around sex and technology. I’m interested in thinking about how new technologies are being developed and whether or not they are being developed in ways that will increase or decrease our access to sexual expression and exploration. Technology may be neutral, but the people who make it aren’t. So I wonder about how capitalism, the system within which all computational technologies are developed, inserts itself in our sexual options and our access to basic sexual rights. I’m also interested in thinking about how sexuality professionals can play a role in the development of new technologies.
Are you working on anything specific right now? Have a project you are excited about or an issue that’s on your mind a lot? Please share it with us!
Yes! I’ve actually got two things I’m working on that I’m extra excited about. The first is called the Sexuality and Access Project. The purpose of the project is to facilitate more discussion of issues around sexuality and disability particularly in the context of attendant services (sometimes also called personal support work). The project began with a survey of over 400 people who use attendant services and people who provide attendant services about the many ways that sexuality intersects with using and providing what some people refer to as attendant care. From that we developed some amazing documentary video tools and are doing our first trainings in September. If people are interested they can find out more on our Facebook page, or they can always send us an email at sexuality.access@gmail.com
The other project is a book for kids about sex. Actually it’s a series of books. The first is written and I’m just trying to figure out whether to try and work with a publisher or publish it myself. I have so many friends who are now having kids and who want books that reflect their lives and experience, so I started by writing a book for the son of a friend of mine, and then I started reading it to other kids and it was both fun and challenging. It’s been a long time since I did something that I then had to go out and tell lots of people about, so I’m having mixed feelings about how to put something out in the world in a way that takes up some space, but still feels ethical and doesn’t scare me too much. But I’m committed to doing something with it in 2012.
Thank you for your time and your wonderful answers, Cory!
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