(Photo: tank top in Thailand, by Dust Mason)

In her new paper, Consciousness-raising 2.0: Sex Blogging and the Creation of a Feminist Sex Commons, Elizabeth Wood of Sex in the Public Square argues for the value of women’s personal blogging about sex. Those 1970’s “consciousness-raising” groups, designed to bring women together to share stories, find common ground, and recognize that “the personal is political” — remember that?  I wasn’t born yet, so I pathetically idealize that time.  Also, recent feminist work has challenged the assumptions of those early CR groups — women-only spaces aren’t by definition “safe,” and not all women are created or socialized equally. In some CR groups, the experiences of women of color, working class women, and LBTQ women were flattened to the same sexless beige that middle-class, white, educated women rebelled against in their own safe suburban hives.

The hope that information & communication technologies like blogging can be a vehicle for women’s political capital?  As traditional venues feminist bookshops and publications lose political ground (and viability), perhaps that’s just as well — as those spaces were only ever so hospitable to Everywoman.  A certain kind of feminist sexuality has long dominated the character and conversations in those spaces, one that still can produce a Betty Dodson or a Carol Queen every few decades, but when it does, those trailblazers are still seen as unlikely, if not outside the norm.  And when we do produce a sex smart theorist, educator, or community shaker-upper?  The siren song of sexpertise is there, to beckon her from the grassroots to the mainstream.  Heaven shame me for suggesting that the oomph and sass of feminist sexuality can’t thrive in a men’s magazine or talk show: in fact, it’s fucking subversive to attempt to hack that shit.  But when that’s the only venue available for a big broadcast to-do on What Needs To Be Said About Sex?  In a neat way that fits around commercials and publishers’ bigger interests in pushing the hot new thing always?  All those mimeographed manifestos on the power of the pussy start to seem awesomely powerful again.

To bring Elizabeth’s argument back in: if the feminist marketplace of ideas cannot support a true diversity of sexual theory, and neither can the mainstream, then maybe blogging is a wonderful, messy middleground.  Personal sex blogging may be (hopelessly?) marginalized to the hoary Blogspots of the the web, but within every Penthousey story, there can still be an ethic of truth-telling.  That ethic isn’t too different from our original feminist sex rebellion: against the over-medicalization and patholgization of women’s sexuality, and in favor of the multiplicity of bodies, genders, desires, and pleasures we ought to have the right to.

Personal sex blogging still matters: that’s where our girlfriends can still whisper to us about how their bodies work, stories about fucking that will never make it into a peer-reviewed journal (Elizabeth’s article being a historic exception).  Blogging sex is where we can flex our smarts and fuck up in front of our friends.  And if sex blogging spawns a few sexperts along the way, they’ll be different than the previous generations — informed by what it means to write within a community, to share what we’ve got without making a buck right away, to defer to others and not have to agree all the time, and to know: not having to compete for the largely irrelevant and played-out role of Most Important Most Famous Most Whatever Sex Expert Lady makes us all richer for it.