(img: Your author, right now, writing this, predictably at a wifi cafe in San Francisco. Without makeup, except for my eyebrows, which I fill out with a MAC pencil. I haven’t done anything with my hair yet today, either. Shot quick on my iSight. This is the fourth shot I took. It’s here to say, Your sex blog called. She’s not one to do something like this over the phone, but…)
Longtime dear pal of Sexerati Cory Silverberg blogs further on the challenge raised by Susannah Breslin, to build a better sex blog:
I have a deeply neurotic and fundamentally unhealthy relationship to blogs. I belong to a transitional technological demographic and while I read blogs voraciously for work, every click holds the possibility of sending me reeling into a fit of informational inadequacy. To top it all off, reading, writing and thinking about sex is work so virtually the only fun thing left for me about sex is actually having it.
In what shouldn’t be a bold move, but truly is given the current plateaued state of sex blogging, Cory offers the following challenges, to which Sexerati will now respond, point by pointed point:
• A better sex blog would incite action.
Sexerati has deeply difficult activist leanings. We want the world, but we want it now. We can’t do it alone. To organize a responsive readership, and not just on a grand SexyKos level, around sexual politics and rights requires shared vision, and up to this moment, I don’t believe the sexblogosphere has articulated a sexual politics platform enough folks could get behind. How, then, to change this? And to do it every day? Troubling, too, is that, for the fifteen years I’ve spent navigating sex culture, the only constant when it comes to civics and & perverts is that, contrary to our best p.r., being a sexual outsider does not endow one with some greater sense of duty to the public sexual good. It’s a rare few who put their lives and liberty on the line for others, period, let alone in sex.
• A better sex blog would be less cool.
Pushing the blogger-as-brand has prematurely profesionalized sex blogging. Blogging, and just barely so sex blogging, may be making moguls, but certainly not of us, the writers. What’s sad is that making a living in sex still shakily rests on one’s ability to be at once pundit, expert, and shameless self-promoter. Some, and likely, too many, sex bloggers still believe they have to bank on blogebrity to be meaningful. Working in sex is not always sexy, either — a fact that mass media has yet to accept, but one we are in a unique position to challenge. But will “our people” still love us if we bring on the painful, messy, raw, and awkward, and leave the carefully posed Flickr candids behind?
• A better sex blog would reveal something about the reader and the blogger.
Back to the painful, messy, raw, and awkward. Professionalism in sex blogging makes too much confessional a career liability, but then again, enough with the soulbaring already, really. Where is the middle place, where one’s own nakedness as a blogger teases out the same in the reader, without having to splay one’s nethers wide? The irony here is, you can still find my cunt on the web. Find evidence of my sex life of late? Try a little harder. It’s no longer the point. Or my point. We know play-by-play of every fuck can be just as much a performance as a dry and tidy little essay. So now what? I want to seduce again with sex, but this time, I want to seduce stories.
• A better sex blog would be about everything, just like sex.
Or, an opportunity to sound off from on high, “No, the reason you can’t have an orgasm isn’t because you can’t operate your own body or you don’t have the right to own a vibrator. It might be because you work sixty hours a week, or have a partner who only wants to get off himself, or because you’re scared you’ll tell her you love her, or you can’t relax because you couldn’t afford an abortion again, or you don’t get aroused no matter how wet you are if the light in the room is from a television reminding you that America is as fucked as you are not in this moment.” That doesn’t go down well as a how-to, no. Which is even more so why it is time to say…
• A better sex blog would be critical about sex.
Sex is not liberating. Sex is not heaven. Sex is not love. Sex is not commitment. Sex is not pleasure. Sex is not a relationship. Sex is not positive. Sex is not smart. Sex is. It’s our culture that does all the rest of those parlor tricks. Time to shine a light where it belongs, and not up sex’s skirt, but on the whole damn peep show audience: us.
• A better sex blog would be subversive.
So if a better sex blog could redistribute sexual wisdom more democratically, could a better sex blog then also put this trope of sex blogger-as-sexpert out of business? And where does that leave all of us, the people formerly known as the audience?
I’m willing to see.
One Comment
Your second post reminds me of an entry I recently wrote [ http://clarissethorn.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/bdsm-related-relationship-screwups/ ]. Relevant excerpt:
I’ve got some ideas for posts about some of the problems that have come up, the mistakes I’ve made in my BDSM relationships. But I’m also terrified of posting them. I identify primarily as a bottom — a mostly heterosexual one to boot … so I’m a woman who likes being hurt and dominated by male partners. (Though I’ll admit to a couple of toppish screwups in my time, too.) And that means that the average audience could map all kinds of scary, incorrect abuse images onto my stories. I mean, even I — when I was coming into BDSM — even I was afraid that my desires meant I “wanted” to be assaulted, that I “wanted” to be raped, that I was participating in something deeply warped and abusive.
Of course I don’t want to be assaulted, I don’t want to be raped — of course I am not participating in abuse. But. If even I had these thoughts, once … then how can I expect an audience containing vanilla people to look at my desires, my fantasies, my consensual experiences without flinching in horror? In this particular case, how do I talk about BDSM experiences that went wrong? If I discuss my less-than-perfect moments here, I think I’m mostly telling them to a BDSM-friendly audience: an audience that will get something constructive out of what I’m saying, and might use my experiences as a guide to avoid screwups themselves. But then again, this is the wide world of the Internet, where the audience potentially contains everyone. And the last thing I want is for Concerned Women for America to pick up one of my blog posts and quote me out of context and tell the world about Clarisse Thorn’s abusive BDSM lifestyle.
Arguably, this is a particularly important problem for me, because I am specifically trying to do BDSM outreach right now. I am trying to let the world know that kinksters are not scary. Do I have more “responsibility” in my self-representation? Is it more dangerous for me to talk about problematic BDSM experiences, than it would be for other people?
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[...] Re[2]: How To Build a Better Sex Blog, and How We’ll Do It, Do It, and Do It Well : Sexerati: Smar… “Sex is. it’s our culture that does all the rest of those parlor tricks. Time to shine a light where it belongs, and not up sex’s skirt, but on the whole damn peep show audience: us.” (tags: blogs blogging sex sexuality society community adult web2.0) [...]