When I first heard that a chapter from my book, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex (2013), had been excerpted on Salon.com in July of that year, I was thrilled. What a perfect way to attract readers and make the most of the precious time right after publication!

But when I pulled up the web link that appeared in my inbox that morning, my heart sunk. The headline read: “‘Sexy Spring: How group sex will liberate Iran, China’ by Katherine Frank.”

I never make such a simplistic claim in the book, and in fact, argue against the idea that any kind of sex is inherently liberating. The click bait headline was accompanied by a harsh editing job that made it easy to lose the overall point. Someone had removed the middle of the chapter in a way that was not immediately apparent to readers, splicing together stories about Iran and China cutting out the material on the United States completely. The footnotes were removed. Maybe no one reads footnotes anymore — but they contained my citations!

My despair grew as I scrolled down the page. I hadn’t yet learned one of the most important lessons for an author about navigating the Internet — never read the comment section. The inflammatory title had completely framed discussion of the article, as supporters of the idea that group sex was liberating argued against the angry critics, most of whom spoke disparagingly about me (How could I possibly be an anthropologist and make such a stupid claim? Where was my knowledge of social theory, power, capitalism, Iran, China, freedom, etc.?). Some just wanted off with my head, calling me “demented” or “immoral.” A few commenters noticed that I hadn’t made any such claims in the article, as in this tweet from Justin Green. (Thanks!) Others, unfortunately, never read further than the title before arguing their points.

Salon did the right thing when I alerted them to the problems with the piece. Within a few days, the lead editor added a note that the piece was an “edited excerpt” from my book — not an original article — and indicated where cuts had been made in the original text. Although they could not remove the title or byline, which I hadn’t written, the article was pulled from the archives. It can still be accessed through the direct link: “Sexy Spring: How group sex will liberate Iran, China.” Making the piece more difficult to access seemed like the best way to prevent future academics, at least, from citing it instead of my book.

Unfortunately, the piece had already “gone viral.” It was forwarded around the Internet slightly fewer times than “Amazing Puppy Learns to Walk by Getting into the Swim of Things” and “These Photos of Madonna in her Prime are Unreal,” but slightly more times than “Zimbabwe President Vows to Behead Gays,” according to Scanvine. In the world of the Internet, those stats are barely significant, but for an academic researcher already wary of being misquoted, it was distressing.

Over the next several weeks, the article was reposted on blogs around the world and reprinted with increasingly lurid titles, like “Group Sex Defeats Dictators!”[2] If only…. On YouTube, a video appeared labeled, “Are Huge Orgies Liberating Iran?” (The fallout that anthropologist Pardis Mahdavi faced after initially writing about sex parties among youth in Iran (Passionate Uprisings, 2009) was far more vitriolic than what I experienced; unfortunately, the discussion of her research in this piece reignited her harassment as well.)

On the bright side, the Internet is a wild place, and one click bait piece is quickly replaced by another. Googling “group sex Iran China” still turns up dozens of hits, but thankfully they’re no longer about me. The article has been mentioned less frequently over the years, and people who have stumbled on it later seemed to at least read the entire piece. (See examples here and here).

My “Sexy Spring” experience drove home a point from the book, which was that even the idea of group sex is emotionally and symbolically powerful. I wrote hundreds of pages in Plays Well in Groups about how and why group sex evokes extreme emotional responses, regardless of decade or culture — and here an excerpt from the book was causing a ruckus just by a headline. Because of this emotional power, transgressive sex has been linked to ideals of personal and social transformation throughout history. Sex can become a way of learning about oneself and others, and in certain contexts, a way of reimagining the world. The examples presented from Iran and China were illustrations of how “orgies” become talked about as liberating or revolutionary, sparking both hopes and fears of massive change. But the other examples I used, which were edited out of the excerpt, make the story more complicated. From the hippie idealism of Sandstone Retreat in the 1970s or the edginess of the Playboy Mansion in its heyday to the contemporary US landscape, for example — where college students celebrate birthdays with threesomes, teen magazines give anal sex tips, and orgy scenes are searchable on porn sites like Tube8 — we can certainly see some significant social changes. But these changes have arguably ended not in a “new world order” but in commodification and disillusionment. Depending on who you talk to.

My “Sexy Spring” experience also drove home what we are up against as academics when we want to tell complicated stories or delve deep into a topic. After all, none of my academic writing has ever gone viral. A pseudo-story about my work did, though: In August 2013, the Daily Mail reworked an interview from 2003 about my first book, G-Strings and Sympathy, with the new headline: “Strip Clubs Save Marriages” (read article here). And, of course, I never argued that strip clubs save marriages either.

I’m not a fan of jargon, boring writing, or esoteric arguments, although I’ll wade through it all when it’s related to my research. When it comes to other topics, though, I’ll admit to being sucked in by sensationalism. If I’m watching Shark Week documentaries, I want to see those giant bloody teeth as much as anyone — even though I know I should be paying attention to the cautious scientist explaining the bad rap that sharks get in the media. People are bored easily nowadays — the last I heard, the adult attention span was hovering around eight seconds, one second less than your average goldfish. Today’s Internet publications fight a real battle trying to persuade readers to click through to their stories since they can’t rely on newspaper or magazine deliveries. A recent study analyzed 100 million headlines to see which ones generated the most response on Facebook and other forms of social media. The researchers found that the most powerful headlines — which had twice the number of clicks and shares of even the second-place contenders — included the words “will make you” (cry/laugh/get goosebumps/etc.) (http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/). These headlines promise content that will have direct emotional impact on the reader, even though it matters less whether the content actually delivers on that promise than that you looked.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that publishing academic work and popular pieces are two different games with different sets of rules and expectations. Let’s just hope that it stays that way, and that there remains a place for careful analysis. And let’s be thankful that some people, some of the time, are willing to read beyond the headlines. Maybe even the footnotes.

[1] This claim is completely unfounded, has nothing to do with the article, and is only used as an attention getter.

[2] http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/18635-group-sex-defeats-dictators