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At a dinner recently with some tech entrepreneurs and media darlings, I was subjected to the usual questions in regard to my writing.
“You write about sex?” someone asked me.
Before I could respond, a friend of mine who blogs about technology events for a local weekly piped up: “AV is going to do great things one day.”
There it was: the often-unsaid but very real idea that somehow, writing about sex is not as important as writing about anything else.
CAN'T STOP LOOKING
In 2003, the author Catherynne M. Valente reviewed an old blog of mine:
Reading Anaiis for the first time is rather like the scene in The Graduate when Mrs. Robinson strips her clothes off and stands naked as Eve in front of the camera. We cut back and forth between her body and Dustin Hoffman's horrified and flustered expression while she leans against the wall, totally calm.
And the body isn't perfect, it's heavy-hipped, small-breasted and a little lumpy, as though it's been used way too many times. It's a 70s porn star after she's resorted to flipping pancakes down at the local IHOP. But it is beautiful. And just the shock of seeing that woman expose herself to you is entirely exciting and delicious because it's so wrong. You just can't stop looking.
In a sense, we've come a long way. Sexuality, once locked up and hidden from view, is once again able to flow freely across the blogosphere in a beautiful return to the tradition of storytelling. But it would be inaccurate to say that this indicates that social perceptions of sexuality have changed much—after all, how many people writing about their sexual experiences are doing so under their real names?
The truth is that we are living in a strange duality—an open culture which politically seems to encourage and support sexual self-expression, and a “don't ask, don't tell” society where people do still judge those who share about their bodies, their desires and their sexual choices.
It makes me think of something the philosopher Alexandre Koyré once said:
I have been saying that modern science broke down the barriers that separated the heavens from the earth, and that it unified and united the universe. And that is true. But, as I have said, too, it did this by substituting the world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, with another world—the world of quantity, or reified geometry, a world in which, though there is a place for everything, there is no place for man... True, these worlds are everyday—and even more and more—connected by praxis. Yet they are divided by an abyss. Two worlds: this means two truths. Or no truth at all.
THE GHETTO
In her book Naked On The Internet, Audacia Ray touches on how repressive social views have largely divorced the sex blog from the rest of the blogosphere:
Sex blogs occupy a very definite Internet ghetto, and despite the fact that women who maintain these blogs put a lot of care into their posts beyond just pictures, goofy quizzes and links without commentary, it’s fairly common that they get scoffed at and seen as a lesser form of blog, especially by other bloggers who do not blog about sex.
The ghettoizing of the sex blog is something of a two-pronged problem: writing and thinking about sexuality is seen as an easy way to get attention and not at all a noble pursuit, and most of the people who blog in detail about sexuality and their personal lives are women. These two elements are intertwined in a way that serves to devalue women’s writing even if it is not always directly about sex, while creating an instant funnel for negative comments towards any woman who ventures to the dark side of writing about sex.
Sex writing, even when it’s about women’s personal experiences, is viewed as a cheap trick to get more hits, links and controversy. And while this is a valid trick—or criticism, as the case may be—the suggestion that women blogging about sex are inherently cheap and unworthy of attention beyond gawking is shortsighted and sexist.
The reaction to sex blogging is rooted in a lack of understanding as to why people would want to blog about their sex life. Many people believe sex should be private and analyze why bloggers would bring that out in (sometimes semianonymous) public. It’s also related to the commonly held belief that sex is not just that important on a societal level.
But it is important. It's important because sex
