Q: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?
A: Laci Green and I am 26, hailing from Los Angeles, California. I teach sex ed and I got my start on YouTube. I started making my YouTube series when I was 16 years old and I have been doing it for 10 years now.
Q: Did the YouTube videos just start off as an interest?
A: I was in high school, and then had just started college, I was making videos, originally was making videos about my religion actually, because I grew up Mormon. That is kind of how I got my start in sex education activism. My church and my family were really sex negative and I thought that was a problem and I wanted to create a new community.
Q: What is your favorite thing to speak to people about?
A: Healthy sexuality, which extends into a lot of different things and one of the things I am going to be talking about tonight is one of the biggest barriers to healthy sexuality which is the amount of sexual trauma that exists in the world.
Q: How do you come up with topics for your YouTube videos?
A: There are a few things that influence it, sometimes like Breast Cancer Awareness Month or International Women's Day, that kind of stuff. Most of the time the topics that I pick are determined by my viewers that email me questions and instead of answering the questions directly, I will do a topic that covers kind of all of the basis, a brief covering of those basis.
Q: What are your goals for this year?
A: I have some really big projects in the works but I cannot talk about them publicly yet.
Q: You travel and speak to people, how do you choose where you go? Is it mostly college campuses?
A: About 90% of the speaking I do is at college campuses so I mostly work with students and student activists particularly. I work one on one with them a lot to help them implement changes in their communities. I also speak at high schools, I have worked with the military and government organizations, a lot of health organizations but relative to the amount of schools that I visit, it is not so many.
Q: Out of all the places and colleges that you have visited, which one is your favorite?
A: That is really hard, people ask me that all of the time, I have visited 150 schools. Each of those experiences is different and unique in its own ways. I really love visiting Canada though, I feel like people up there are not more educated necessarily but I get the impression that they are a little more open minded, that makes it easier to have these conversations but it also means that going to places where people aren't as willing to talk about it is even more important.
Q: Where are you heading next?
A: Tomorrow I am headed to Arizona.
Q: What do you like to do for fun in your spare time?
A: Fun? What's fun? I don't have fun. No, I'm kidding. I am a big backpacker. I like to go backpacking and hiking and camping and all that kind of stuff. And I live in LA now so I am kind of getting into the music scene which is really fun. Mostly I just like being outdoors and chilling out, I'm a pretty low key person.
Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
A: That's a good question, I think that I would like to do more research and I would like to get into some more of the academic aspects in creating more resources, not just for students but for teachers so I'm not sure exactly, I am still figuring it out. Right now a lot of the work that I do is with the media, Discovery, and MTV and stuff. That is cool and fun but I don't know if I am going to be a media person forever, I want to be more of the behind the scenes disseminating information. However I figure I can do that best is where I would like to end up.
Q: What are you talking about tonight at Michigan State?
A: This talk is about rape culture. I feel like rape culture is a loose term that people don't really understand, I am basically going to be taking about various culturally sanctioned behaviors and attitudes and ideas that create sexual violence, so how our culture is causing this problem and by understanding what's causing it, we can understand how to stop it.
