It says it right there in my Twitter bio, I am a Sex Geek.
It’s a term that was coined and made popular by renowned sex educator Reid Mihalko and I’ve been one since before there even WAS a term for it. A Sex Geek is much like a geek of any other flavor. Geekiness denotes a persons passionate and intense interest in a subject. Star Wars Geeks, Design Geeks, Sex Geeks, get it?
As a preteen I used to re-read the passages from all my Judy Blume books about menstruation over and over and over.
As a teen I watched the old Loveline TV show when it was on MTV, which now makes me cringe, thinking of Dr. Drew Pinsky sex-negative attitudes!
At 18 I worked on a production of The Vagina Monologues with a troupe of about 20 other fierce feminists!
In college I attended Seattle’s very first (now annual) Erotic Art Festival.
Currently, I listen to 10 times more sex related podcasts than I do design podcasts and I run the Seattle Chapter of Sex Geekdom — a global community for people who love having geeky conversations about sex.
Why is something that is a part of almost everyone’s life such a taboo subject? Why is it considered risky for me to call myself a Sex Geek publicly on forums like Twitter or here on the blog? As the new year approaches, I have decided to be more vocal on my public social media platforms about my life as a sex geek. I volunteer for a number of sex-positive art and activist groups in Seattle and as a designer, I think my knowledge and skills could be utilized within the sex-positive community to help break down some of these social stigmas.
You can follow me on this journey here or by following me on Twitter, @lizandrade.