How Stormy Daniels has learned to handle trolls. How the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) precipitated, then reconciled, a social media callout avalanche. How the principles of nonviolent communication can be used both within the adult industry and in its relationship with the outside world. These were some anecdotes and calls to action offered in “Peacemaking through Social Media: How Sex Workers Are Achieving Social Justice Online,” one of 15 presentations delivered at SexPosCon, a biennial conference featuring an international group of sex-positive practitioners, scholars, and clinicians that concluded last weekend at Woodbury University in Burbank.
“Social media humanizes sex workers,” said Riley Reyes, president of APAC, who presented the seminar with BDSM pornographer Tim “Pro Villain” Woodman. “You see our passions and our hobbies. You see that we are real people in addition to watching us get our holes stuffed.”
SexPosCon is produced by L.A.’s Center for Positive Sexuality, which was established in 2011 and qualified for non-profit status in 2013. According to founder Emily Prior, M.A., who teaches in Woodbury’s Psychology Department, “Sexuality is often the nexus where social issues meet, and our mission is to address social issues through sexuality education.”
The theme of 2020’s SexPosCon was Peacemaking, and each session uniquely tackled Peacemaking within an often fractious community.
“Adult has a lot of strong personalities, so they inevitably clash,” Reyes said, explaining that because performers “have to preserve our online brands and personas, conflict needs to be handled gently, and ideally off a public forum.”
But sometimes conflicts unfurl online. Reyes recalled APAC’s “fun and community-building” call for a free photo shoot/content trade that backfired because the original grouping of photographers included no women or persons of color.
“It was my fault,” Reyes said. “We got called out for it, we admitted our mistake, and we took steps to address it.”
Reyes noted that in the “calling out,” one must take into account the intention of the person who has caused you a grievance.
“Sometimes people are looking to be offended,” Woodman added, “but sometimes you have to admit they have a point.”
In discussing both troll behavior and handling legitimate concerns online, Reyes says that she and APAC members have drawn from established methods of conflict resolution laid out in Marshall Rosenberg’s program of nonviolent communication, which was developed in the 1960s and is internationally used in mediating conflict today.
Reyes says she first learned of the principles of nonviolent communication not through her work with APAC but via participation in polyamorous and nonmonogamous communities.
“We found that a lot of harms could be better solved with empathy than by trying to punish one another,” she said. And she has applied this to her work at APAC and when dealing with the public online, as she is also a performer.
“But Stormy [Daniels] is the master,” Reyes said, flipping through several slides of Daniels deftly taking down trolls on her Twitter account.
Along with engaging in presentations like “Ecological Intimacy” and “Consent within the Erotic Hypnosis Fetish Community,” SexPosCon attendees had the opportunity to network as well as participate in a play-party at local BDSM club Threshold. Other topics included “Sex Speech: Problems of Tabooed Talk,” with German philosopher Anna Mense, which approached the linguistics of sexuality via a discourse on the various Greek myths of Echo, Narcissus and Hera.
SexPosCon weekend also featured the launch of the CPS certification program in Sex Positive Education, a mentored and interdisciplinary 150-hour program of online and in-person training incorporating critical approaches to subjects like porn, BDSM, polyamory and prostitution. The program is designed for clinicians, legal professionals and other scholars whose work might benefit from a deeper understanding of sex-positive research.
Prior, who teaches at several other institutions in addition to Woodbury, noted that her board and staff planned this year’s SexPosCon “for a year, and non-stop for the past two months,” so she is happy keeping the symposium a biennial event. “We send speakers to a number of different places, and work with a lot of communities,” she says, “in addition to the certification program. Plus, we are very focused on presenting topics related to our chosen theme, rather than shoehorning things in.”
On the subject of this year’s theme vis-à-vis Porn Valley, Reyes conceded, “Drama is a constant, so sometimes we have to step back and settle for peacekeeping rather than peacemaking.”
For more information on the Center for Positive Sexuality, visit PositiveSexuality.org.
For more about APAC, visit APAC-usa.com.
Photos courtesy Dr. Hernando Chaves.
