Saskia Vogel talks to New York sex writer Karley Sciortino about her recently published, no-holds-barred memoir.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":62756,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[2416,10076,6201,10307,7867,124,4947,10308,10309,6203,10310,10311,2483],"class_list":["post-62750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-book","tag-dominatrix","tag-karley-sciortino","tag-kathy-acker","tag-netflix","tag-new-york","tag-sex","tag-sex-and-the-city","tag-sex-work","tag-slutever","tag-sophia-amoruso","tag-viceland","tag-vogue"],"acf":{"legacy":false,"main_category":false,"hero_title":"Karley Sciortino: \"I don\u2019t feel shame about my sexual history. I feel excited about it.\"","subtitle":"Saskia Vogel talks to New York sex writer Karley Sciortino about her recently published, no-holds-barred memoir.","hero":{"video":false,"image":false,"header_color":"black","overlay_color":"","overlay_text_color":"black"},"teasers":{"video":false,"image":false,"width":"4","proportion":"default"},"facebook_image":false,"related_articles":"","next_article":"","content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"6","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":"
It\u2019s Valentine\u2019s Day and I\u2019m waiting for a call from Karley Sciortino, AKA Slutever, author of \u201cSlutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World\u201d and host of Viceland\u2019s eponymous sex-ed show. Classic. It\u2019s like I\u2019m in middle school again, crushing on a new friend. I remind myself: just because I know about that one time she got doused by a moon cup full of blood while making out with a woman in a bathroom in Bournemouth doesn\u2019t mean we\u2019re friends. But that\u2019s the thing with Karley Sciortino \u2013 her voice, it resonates.<\/p>\n
From her first blogposts in 2007 about living in \u2018Squallyoaks\u2019, a South London squat, to her explorations of kinky B&Bs in her native upstate New York, Sciortino is on a quest for \u201ccasual slutty enlightenment,\u201d AKA learning and lolz \u2013 and she’s inviting us along. Of course, I\u2019m smitten. It\u2019s by design.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just was never great at objectivity when it came to writing,\u201d the 32 year old tells me. \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel natural to me. I always felt like my writing was driven by my own curiosity, about wanting to experience something, so it made perfect sense for me \u2014rather than just be like \u2018Let me shadow a dominatrix and be a fly on the wall\u2019 \u2013 to just do that and then write about it. [\u2026] And for the show, I feel like television journalism is really effective when the host is sort of like a surrogate for the audience, right? We see it all the time in stuff like [TV chef] Anthony Bourdain, who puts himself into a world and eats the food. But with sex, it\u2019s often not portrayed like that. As a viewer we\u2019re distant.\u201d She suggests this distance turns the topic into a curiosity rather than something to be curious about. With Karley as host and participant, she\u2019s refusing to demonise or sensationalise going after what you desire and hope for. \u201c[T]he viewer will be able to imagine themselves doing it, [too],\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
At the start of each episode of \u201cSlutever\u201d we enter a bedroom with a sleazy Eighties vibe, pink-lit with a potted palm tree. In an episode entitled \u201cLifestyle Slaves\u201d Karley is shown multitasking on her bed in a negligee: typing with one hand, her hair in one curler, an unused tampon clamped between her teeth and painting her toenails, which are already thick with chipped polish. Her voiceover says: \u201c[Sigh]. Life is so hard. Between meeting my blog deadlines and performing my gender, I barely have time to get anything done. [\u2026] Gawd, I need a lifestyle slave. I\u2019ve heard that\u2019s actually a thing. But who on this flat earth would want that job? And am I a bitch for wanting one? And more importantly, is there an app for that?\u201d Karley goes on to visit a dominatrix and her two slaves who help with household chores and more, asking questions that feel unfiltered, and then puts out a call for a slave of her own. Sciortino says: \u201cWe\u2019ve always joked around about [the pink room] being my brain, playing on the idea of the ditzy blonde woman and also the idea of sexual naivet\u00e9.\u201d Just like a warped millennial Carrie Bradshaw, a woman whom the author cites as \u201cthe ultimate reference for me\u201d. Unlike when she was \u201c23 and thought it was super-radical to have my boobs all over the Internet,\u201d she now tries to make sure her image as a sex journalist is funny, playful and ironic.<\/p>\n
Since her early sex-ed web series for Vice in 2012, she and producer Adri Murguia \u201calways liked the idea of a tongue-in-cheek \u2018Sex and the City\u2019 reference\u201d because today \u201cthere\u2019s so much more sarcasm around the idea of these grand questions about sex\u201d. She adds that she admires Candace Bushnell, whose columns for The<\/em> New York<\/em> Observer<\/em> between 1994 and 1996 were the basis for the iconic show, describing the journalist as \u201cdark, unapologetic and slutty\u201d \u2013 words that could also describe Sciortino\u2019s work. Reclaiming the word \u2018slut\u2019 might help reframe how women are able to think about their sexual experiences. \u201c#metoo\u201d is an important movement, Sciortino says, but she worries about how the discourse around it, particularly the idea of sex as inherently dangerous, is impacting how we are able to navigate and interpret our experiences. \u201cSo many of my friends are sex workers. I just admire their attitude about sex. They\u2019re so strong, and they have so much ability to negotiate the type of sex that they want. They know how to be responsible about their sexual behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"6","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" In her book, Sciortino carries us through on a wave of charm and humour, and only mentions darker experiences in passing. This is a literary technique she employs to let us know she is the reliable narrator of her own story. When she wakes up after a long blackout in a strange hotel room, you worry \u2013 but you don\u2019t worry. Whatever happened, she is asking us to trust her account.<\/p>\n The desire for women to operate with full sexual autonomy led Sciortino to contend with her own cultural baggage concerning the commodification of sex and the assumption that all sex work is degrading. \u201cBecause invisibility is such a huge part of being a sex worker, we often don\u2019t hear the stories of women who like what they do.\u201d That includes her own story.<\/p>\n After befriending a glamorous young escort named Madeline, Sciortino, then still in the early stages of her career as a writer in New York, wondered if being a \u201cnoodle slave\u201d at a Chinese restaurant made more sense than \u201cfinancial exchange for sexual companionship\u201d. By her mid-to-late twenties, she\u2019d already enjoyed gigging as a dominatrix, and relished the absurdity of how much more she could earn with her urine than waitressing and writing features for magazines.<\/p>\n Though she had written about her dominatrix work, it took her until the publication of her book \u2013 when she felt financially secure and established enough so that her career wouldn\u2019t \u201cspiral out of control\u201d \u2013 to speak publicly about the subject. Why? \u201cBecause of the, you know, \u2018whorearchy\u2019, as it\u2019s often called. Being a dominatrix isn\u2019t thought of as being as being as \u2018dirty\u2019 or \u2018degrading\u2019 as other forms of sex work because you\u2019re not having full penetrative sex with your clients.\u201d However: \u201cI started to feel hypocritical because I was writing a lot at the time on my website about sex worker rights and being very pro-sex work in general, but keeping that aspect of my life a secret because I understood, to a degree, that we don\u2019t live in a post-shame world. I was just starting [to work] at Vogue [writing her \u201cBreathless\u201d column], and they have a PR team that was not going to be chill about that.\u201d In the New York Times in 2013, she described American Vogue as \u201cactually pretty conservative\u201d, citing \u201ca long email exchange about not being able to say the word \u2018sperm\u2019 outside a scientific context\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cApproximately two percent of adult females in the US,\u201d she writes, \u201care sugar babies,\u201d which is equal to the \u201cestimated percentage of gay people in America. And yet, no one cares about sex workers\u2019 rights.\u201d Authors Maya Angelou, Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill have spoken about supporting themselves with sex work, for instance. Some, like artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti, have also used sex as a central inquiry in their creative work. Or there\u2019s the entrepreneur and best-selling author of the 2014 coming-of-age memoir \u201c#Girlboss\u201d, Sophia Amoruso, who in a podcast with Sciortino, talked about her time as a stripper in Portland. Worth considering in this category as well is sex worker-activist and ex-Los Angeles Police Department cop, Norma Jean Almodovar, who in an interview in Sciortino\u2019s book calls women like herself, who have chosen sex work, \u201cpractical\u201d.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"images","gallery":false,"settings":{"fit_width":"4","caption":""}},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" By telling these stories Sciortino wants to help us get a clearer and perhaps more prosaic understanding of the commodification of sex by doing something as radical as making room for the possibility that a career in sex, like sexual experience in general, can be good, bad and meh, and maybe all at once. \u201cWhen I\u2019m alone with myself and even judging myself, so to speak, I don\u2019t feel personal shame about my sexual history. I feel excited about it. And even the moments that were sort of less than excellent were learning experiences.\u201d She hopes by reclaiming the concept, \u201cthe \u2018slut\u2019 label will have less power to harm\u201d.<\/p>\n Sciortino\u2019s vision of a post-shame world is \u201cmore of an aspirational way of looking at how women of my generation are approaching the idea of female sexual agency and their own sexual desire. We\u2019re moving in the right direction when it comes to the sexual double standard. I think that women have increasingly less shame around sleeping with more than one person or being kinky or just being horny in general, right?\u201d The answer is up to us.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"text_area","text_area":" Photographs by Ashley Armitage for Viceland.<\/p>\n This article is taken from the Spring 2018 issue of SLEEK,<\/p>\n"}]},"yoast_head":"\n
\nHer take on sex in pop culture is that women lack diverse sexual role models. \u201cYou never see a man having a traumatising sexual experience, ever. Like if he\u2019s literally tricked into sex, it ends up being a joke that he laughs at with his friends. If a woman has a sort of apathetic sexual experience, she\u2019s traumatised. We really lack women in [the] media who represent this idea of a woman who is sexually promiscuous or sexually curious or sexually driven, even [someone] who isn\u2019t somehow traumatised or punished by that behaviour.\u201d Like Samantha on \u201cSex and the City\u201d or the happy sex worker Sciortino played on Netflix\u2019s \u201cEasy\u201d. She adds: \u201cThe idea that women are always the victim of sex removes our agency and power.\u201d<\/p>\n