By Kuono.

Last night I finished reading Audacia Ray’s newest publication Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration. Audacia can be found online at Waking Vixen Productions. (We don’t sell the book at Good Vibes so I recommend purchasing it from Last Gasp Press which also published some other great reads including one that I modeled in (plug to that!) which is Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl. Last Gasp also published a bunch of books by one of our GV Magazine erotica contributors Daphne Gottlieb and Julia Serano’s book which might be next in my reading list: Whipping Girl: a transexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity sounds really enticing.

I love reading when I have the chance, and I particularly like reading about things that pertain to my current job or project without it feeling like work. Audacia’s book was perfect in this regards because it read like a really great blog - she writes with the personal language of a friend, a really cool one who’s got the insider knowledge.

The topics she explores in the book are no light matter, and she does so with the exploration and education as such so that you feel as if you’re on the journey with her, googling from one topic to the next, and reading each printed page as if it were a well composed blog entry - which because it is a physical hand-held object makes you want to open it up at your computer screen to use as a reference guide as you go.

Big kudos to anyone trying to encompass the expansive and always morphing role of the www. More kudos to the fact that Audacia acknowledges at the very get-go of the book the fact that the internet is still widely (if not wildly) unavailable to most people, most women, most women of color, most non-American/non-English-speaking/non-literate women, most low-income women, and a whole bunch of other people who may or may not identify as women, etc…

I think a lot of folks, myself included, forget the privledge we have to be reading this right now.

I also think that any woman (or person for that matter) who has a myspace page or who has dabbled in any online community profile network should read this book.

Also a big kudo to an entire section on Transwomen with some pretty awesome resources (which I’ll add to our links in a second) AND another section totally devoted to Health! The health section alone is reason enough to pick up the book.

- Kuono.

P.S. a post-post disclaimer: I have very little practice writing reviews of any kind and don’t consider myself a book reviewer of any means. My intention is to share exciting things that I’ve recently come across. If you’ve any comments to add to this post about the book or other print or online publications that add to this discussion, please do!
P.S.S. the section about cybersex, in particular fucking machines, was also incredible to read about as this is the first time I’ve heard about it other than via porn on Kink.com. I imagine that I’m not the only one whose life is opening up to a lot of new sexual exploration and information and I for one am grateful that blogs have archives.

Here’s Violet’s account of the story on her own post.

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