Class, trash, and explicitness

Though it’s a little outside of my job description, at the moment I’m making an effort to get the photo galleries at the PEEQ frequently updated and rockin’ (photographers take note, and if you’ve got sexy, erotic, or interesting documentary photography that hasn’t previously been published for free online, drop me a line at dacia [at] thepeeq.com and let’s talk).

Of course I’m looking for stuff that upholds our tagline “naked wit for the sexual intellectual,” which I adore, but it’s been interesting considering the extent to which the content will be explicit and what this means and says about the site, our brand, and all that. Explicitness – as well as style and design – seems to have a pretty heavy impact on how the classiness of a site is perceived.

Lots of sexual imagery is perceived as “trashy.” Especially the more hardcore stuff is viewed as the domain of near-Neanderthals on both the consumer and producer side – shitty grammar, spelling and horrendous box cover design don’t really help at all. I think a lot of this has to do with society’s basic negative treatment of sexuality, especially of the raw and wanton variety. And then there is the realm of classy erotica – the softly lit, “tasteful,” often black-and-white photography that often conceals genitals, and whose producers sometimes actively try to distance themselves from the realm of things pornographic.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently trashy about being explicit, but it’s a little difficult to tease all this out. I know for sure that I can assemble galleries of photos that are both explicit and tasteful, and the pictures won’t make anyone (or most people, at least) feel icky. But on the other hand, I recognize that there are only a handful (though I also think they are multiplying) of photographers who treat explicit sexuality with care, respect and reverence. Curating images like this is one thing, but then there’s the user-generated content end of things.

At the moment, the PEEQ is a little schizophrenic about this – on the page where you upload your profile photo, it says “NO adult” – but we haven’t really defined what that means. On Myspace, Flickr, and Facebook, “adult” includes showing female nipples in any context (including, as one mom discovered on Facebook last month, in the context of breastfeeding). On the PEEQ, the idea behind the “NO Adult” profile pics thing is to hopefully avoid rawness of the id that has guys posting dick pics taken with their phone cameras as their main profile pic. But I think about this constantly, and as much as I personally prefer not to be greeted by dick pics when I click around a social networking site, the line between asking people to think about what is appropriately sexual and enacting censorship is pretty thin. And the line between trying to uphold aesthetic standards and dictating standards of sexuality with regards to class is perhaps even thinner.