BURBANK, Calif.—CatalystCon West ended a successful three-day West Coast run at a new location this past weekend, and announced a major move for the next event: CatalystCon Midwest.
Sex workers, sex educators, adult industry veterans and more gathered at the semi-annual conference Sept. 11-13 at its new host hotel, the Marriott Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif. Attendees participated in a number of educational panels (more than 40 in total) as well as keynote addresses, networking events, Queeraoke and a book launch for The Sex & Pleasure Book, presented by adult retailer Good Vibrations and book authors Carol Queen and Shar Rednour.
“For Shar and I, launching this book wouldn’t have happened without two people,” Queen told the audience during the launch party last Thursday evening. “If it wasn’t for Joanie Blank [the founder of Good Vibrations] and Jackie Strano [Good Vibrations’ current executive vice president], we wouldn’t have this book. We wouldn’t have even met!”
THE Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone draws on Good Vibrations’ decades of diverse and informative customer interactions, plus Staff Sexologist Dr. Carol Queen’s academic training and community experience, to pull together the most informative and empowering sex information book bar none. This book is for people of many identities, experience levels, and interests. Covering sexual changes across the lifespan, the identity spectrum, sexual anatomy, and sex toys and products. This ambitious compendium aims to inform and inspire sexual comfort and exploration.
“We have everything in here,” Rednour said. “We say everything from the cradle to the grave and we really mean it!”
As always, the speaker sessions at CatalystCon covered a variety of topics: “Online Harassment: It Happened To Us, How We Dealt With It, and How You Can, Too,” “Is Your Therapist (therapy) Really Sex Positive,” “The Bonobo Way: Can Better Sex Lead To World Peace?” and “Breaking Silence, Building Connection: Addressing Abuse And intimate Partner Violence In Kink Communities” were among the sessions this year.
In “Litigate To Emanicipate: ESPLERP’s Constitutional Challenge to California’s Prostitution Law” featured members of the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education and Research Project—attorney Vanessa Soma, sex worker Maxine Doogan, retired deputy district attorney Jerald L. Mosley and sex worker Domina Elle—were on hand to discuss their lawsuit and efforts to decriminalize prostitution in the San Francisco Bay area and the rest of the Golden State.
ESPLER filed a complaint with the U.S. Distractor Court in March this year challenging California’s current anti-prostitution law [Penal Code 647(b)] on the grounds the law deprives individuals on the right to engage in consensual, private sexual activity as well as denies individuals a right to choose for themselves how to earn a living and who to enter into a contract with.
As of now, the state had filed a motion to have the case dismissed, and a hearing on that motion was scheduled for Aug. 7, but the judge cancelled the hearing and will instead issue a written decision on the matter, though no timetable on when that decision would be released is available.
If the case is successful, it could decriminalize prostitution in nine western states: California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Alaska.
Mosley noted that current laws do not allow for the intersection of business contact and sexual privacy. When Texas outlawed sodomy between same sex couples, he noted, the U.S. Supreme Court said the law was unconstitutional because it infringed on the couples’ right to privacy to engage in consensual sexual acts. While prostitution involves consensual sexual acts that are private, the exchange of money makes it an issue of commerce.
“The opposition says that they are not outlawing sexual acts or relationships, but just trying to regulate commerce,” he said.
Indirectly helping their cause, panelists said, was the recent declaration by Amnesty International suggesting government consider the decriminalization of prostitution.
“One of the greatest benefits to this is that it was Amnesty International who made the noise and is bringing attention to this,” Mosley said. “It’s been a challenge for us to get this into the mainstream conscious, so this helps get that discussion going.
“This is what civil rights looks like before an issue become accepted and popular,” he added.
In a few other sessions—“New Views On Pornography: A Roundtable Discussion” and “Talking About Porn: Issues, Controversies and Frameworks” featured contributors to the recently published book New Views On Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law.
New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography's politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location for students, researchers, and professors across related fields.
In the panels, speakers talked about their specific chapters for the book, as well as discussed the increased interest in academics studying the industry.
Another popular session at CatalystCon West was “Toys for a SexAbled Life: Fun, Unique and Adaptable Ways to Give and Receive Satisfying Pleasure With Erotic Toys.”
Presenters Robin Wilson-Beattie and Bethany Stevens talked about how sex therapists, adult retails and others often think they need some type of special training to talk about sex, sex toys and more with disabled people.
“And it’s not like we know everything about every sex toy either,” Wilson-Beattie said. “But we are having the conversations.”
The pair talked about everything from existing sex toys that work well for different body types and sexual abilities (Liberator furniture pieces, Magic Wand, Revel Body Sol, etc.) to the importance of investing in quality toys (Wilson-Beattie related a story about using a wand-style vibrator and then falling asleep on it and not feeling it burn her vulva because of reduced feeling from her spinal cord injury) to finding ways to use assistive devices (canes, wheelchairs, etc.) into sexual play to help reclaim sexuality and provide affirmation of the disability.
Finally, CatalystCon founder Dee Dennis announced the semi-annual conference—which traditionally takes place on the East and West coasts—is making a move this spring. Instead of CatalystCon East, the event will move to Chicago for CatalystCon Midwest.
“I’d been asked by several people if we would ever consider doing the conference in other cities, and when I asked for locations, Chicago was named most often,” Dennis said.
CatalystCon Midwest is slated for April 1-3 at Chicago O’Hare Hyatt. The call for speakers for the event is already open.
For more information, visit CatalystCon.com.
