Consciousness-raising 2.0: Sex Blogging and the Creation of a Feminist Sex Commons

Abstract

In this article, I develop the notion of a `sex commons' on the internet as one way to help women build more satisfying sex lives. While women have not historically controlled their own sexuality, they have tended to control the dissemination of information about sexuality, first through oral traditions and traditional social networks, and later through media such as advice columns. Medicalization and the culture of expertise removed much of that control, but the consciousness-raising movement of the second wave of feminism used social networks to reclaim it. This article describes the ways that women's internet sex blogs help develop vocabularies of desire, reduce shame, and build community, enabling women to continue this process of regaining control over information about sexuality. I argue that a commons model is useful for protecting access to that information, especially in the face of continuing medicalization of sexuality and corporate control of the internet, and conclude with suggestions for maintaining the sex commons and building feminist pathways to navigate it.