(…) A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.

There’s just one problem: it isn’t.

Let’s give Belle and the Sunday Times the benefit of the doubt and assume that Magnanti really did approach them, and not the other way around. There’s no reason to doubt Magnanti’s version of events, but it’s worth remembering that the Sunday Times has a particularly grubby history when it comes to anonymous bloggers.

(…) But, despite the fact that the print version of Magnanti’s Times’ interview is illustrated with a photograph of her wearing glamourous evening-wear, let’s assume this was an entirely consensual encounter. Knight also mentions in the interview that Magnanti has an ‘ex-boyfriend with a big mouth’ and that she had decided to go public before the decision was forced on her. Again, let’s assume that the ex-boyfriend hadn’t already contacted the Sunday Times.

Even assuming all of that, the existence of the big-mouthed boyfriend neatly illustrates the biggest problem with becoming a successful anonymous blogger. As your hidden life takes over more and more of your normal life, there comes a point where you have to share your secret with someone you trust. Batman had Alfred the butler, Deep Throat had Bob Woodward and, as any child of the 80s will tell you, three people shared He Man’s secret – his friends the Sorceress, Man-at Arms, and Orko. In Belle’s case, there came a point in forming serious relationships where she had to confess her lucrative hobby to her lover. From that point on she was just one bad breakup away from being exposed.

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This sex positive carnival highlights posts/articles promoting the sexual rights and freedom of women:

This theory of feminism is known more commonly as Sex Positive Feminism, a movement that developed in the 1980s in response to feminists against pornography and prostitution. Sex Positive Feminists (or sex-radical, pro-sex or sexually liberated feminists) believe that women’s sexual freedom is an essential part of women’s autonomy. Any legal or social control or regulation over the sexual self is an attempt to control and regulate women, undermines their freedom and infringes upon their human rights. We are interested in promoting sex workers’ rights, sex education in schools, and we encourage the free expression of sexualities.

Sex Positive Feminists recognise that not all women choose to work within the sex industry and some are grossly exploited, so it is crucial to understand that sex work must be done consensually. Otherwise, it represents another form of control. We understand too that the opposite of sex positive is not necessarily sex negative. For more information about Sex Positive Feminism, click here.

The previous Carnival was hosted at Sugarbutch Chronicles. The upcoming Carnival will be hosted by Ellie Lumpesse. Please visit the Carnival homepage if you’re interested in participating in future editions.

Thank you to everyone who submitted. And now, on to this month’s posts.

Better Burn That Dress Sister: This is our job so recognise our rights…….
The adoption of the mantle of self righteous indignation by prohibitionists when they speak disparately of sex workers rights is both disingenuous and dangerous. They encourage the enforcement of bad laws now and support the adoption of more bad law with the intention, they claim, of protecting the vulnerable. If prohibitionists were honest they would admit that the intention of this bad law that denies sex workers rights, has nothing to do with protecting women and children or in stopping trafficking. The purpose of the persecution now, as in the past, is both to eliminate our work and alienate us from society. New proposals to criminalise clients and further target brothels are just more of the same.

Border Thinking on Migration, Trafficking and Commercial Sex: Will a famous prostitute be allowed to rest alongside Calvin in Geneva?
Grisélidis Réal was known for decades as a prostitute, author and defender of sex work’s uses and skills. She died and was buried a few years ago but now either will or will not be honoured by having her remains moved to a Geneva cemetery where cultural icons like Calvin are buried. The story below illustrates how such honours are interpreted in opposing ways by different people.

Clarisse Thorn: BDSM Outreach: “There is no ’should’” and the sex-positive “agenda”
What’s my “agenda”? What does it mean to be a “pro-BDSM activist”? What’s the “sex-positive agenda”? Who is part of the “sex-positive movement”? These are all questions I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — and they seem to constantly recur around the blogosphere, in varying forms. But here’s a question that’s rarely posed explicitly, and it’s the one that preoccupies me the most: What action can I take in the real world to help create a powerful, energetic sex-positive — and pro-BDSM — movement?

A Femanist View: On Art and Porn
I think we should reject that line, and insist that Porn is Art (how come the two brothers have never been seen in the same room at exactly the same time as each other? *smirk* ). Porn performers and producers, pole dancers and lap dancers, even (willing) prostitutes – yes, all sex workers – are artists and deserve to be recognised for it. Their individual arts are different from one another, just as a sculptor’s art is different from a painter’s, is different from a musician’s, is different from a dancer’s.

Feminist Review: AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India
Negar Akhavi has masterfully edited multiple voices and rhetorical devices to show us how HIV and AIDS have affected Indian society. Half the contributors traverse the deep faultlines of misogyny, poverty, and religious hierarchy. The other half shows what it’s like in India in the time of AIDS to be faithful wives and daughters-in-law (and HIV-infected), poor and low-caste, overburdened healthcare workers, cast-off and orphaned, and non-heterosexual.

Franklin Veaux’s Journal: Some thoughts on tattoos, porn, and respect for women
The term ‘tramp stamp,’ as clever as it sounds (“Oooh! It rhymes! It must be true if it rhymes! If the glove don’t fit, the tramp stamp sits!” Or something) betrays what seems to me to be a very interesting idea about women. It’s a short, simple, 21st-century slang term that packages sixteenth-century ideas about sex and sexuality in a handy, bite-sized piece.

Kidsanity: 14 Kids, 8 Babies, 3 Fingers, 1 Parent: The Math Of Nadya Suleman
What I saw was an articulate young woman who managed to keep her own anger at bay, who seemed understanding and forgiving of people who do not accept her decision, and was composed yet passionate as she tactfully mentioned her beliefs about the sanctity of life. But it was her earliest statements, regarding other large families, which seemed to lie at the root of all of the hullabaloo.

Paper Cuts and Plastic: Why I like to fuck in public
It’s much more about the juxtaposition of the normal around me with what’s going on in my pants. The fact that I can hear or see other people going about their day while I’m in the throes of sex makes me really hot. The vast difference between what I’m feeling and what everyone around me is seeing makes the sensations seem even more exciting and intense.

Relationship Underarm Stick: Puppies, Kittens & Vampires, Oh My!
The ultimate pinnacle in Bad Boys are vampires and other supernatural creatures. Not only are they dangerous and misunderstood, the big strong Bad Boy arms we want to swoon into, but there is no larger a separation than between living and dead, making these men the most unobtainable of all.

Renegade Evolution: Feminism, Sex, BDSM & Other Sore Subjects
I do not say everyone would, or should, or could enjoy what I enjoy. I do not expect, demand, or encourage them to do so unless it is what they actually enjoy. I do however encourage women to speak to and about their own desires, and damn the condemnation that comes with it…because I do think that is important, and I do think that- the speaking- is feminist.

Sabrina in Stockings: So I’m a feminist – and a misogynist?
It’s one thing to rebel against being spoonfed a stereotype as an ideal. It’s another thing to have obvious disgust for your gender (and most of these offending women are primarily gendered female, even if they do sometimes feel male inside; or at least, they express their gender as female).

Tell It WOC Speak
Welcome everyone to what I hope will be the first of many blog carnivals dedicated to the voices of women of colour and our allies.  In every sphere of life women of colour are marginalized and exploited. Often, when we attempt to engage to change our circumstances we are silenced.  This carnival is our attempt to give voice to our shared issues.

. . .These days I don’t have a lot of interest in writing about sex at all. Part of my erotica apathy stems from the sense that I’ve written a lot about sex. I’ve described it. I’ve intellectualized it. I’ve made it funny. I’ve made it emo. I’ve done it in a train. I’ve done it with some pain. I’ve done it with a frown. I’ve done it with a clown. And I don’t know how much more I have to say about the sex. I am proud of my sex-writing. It’s damn good and it taught me a lot. It also has helped other people, or so all the emails I have received specifically about my deep-throating posts have led me to believe.

So there’s the feeling that I’ve done it to death. But there’s also the inescapable fact that I’m not fucking anyone right now, and while it would be nice to do so in the future, I’d like to fuck that person without the intellectual specter hanging over my bed and narrating what I’m doing and feeling. No one needs to imagine an apparitional Howard Cosell providing color commentary whilst one is going at it like rabid mongooses, not unless that fantasy would enhance one’s experience, in which case have at it. Plus there’s the fact that most humans don’t want their sexual experiences put into artful narratives and posted where the virtual world can see it. Sex with a human would be nice. Some day.

More. . . ..

Do you Tweet during sex? You might moan or squeal, but even if you’ve never heard of the free, minimalist social networking service that allows users to write, send and post to the Internet short messages via devices ranging from phones to laptops via SMS (text). This might sound like an “only in San Francisco” kink. Since Twitter.com started here, we may be able to hold them responsible for a new fetish. If there is such a thing. But really, you know that somewhere, someone is doing something sexual with it. It is technology, after all, and humans just can’t seem to resist sexualizing their tech toys.

So the thought of sending a message out to the Internet (the world) while having sex might seem a bit rude. Or, it might be a turn on. For some, it just sounds weird; on the verge of orgasm can you send a coherent text message? Now that sounds like something a cyber-dominatrix might have a field day with.

And it seems, they do. Sex and the Tweet isn’t a new idea, and it’s on the rise – perhaps even moreso as sex workers, international fetish models, dominatrixes, tech savvy porn stars, adult companies with marketing departments, hip porn directors, sex toy makers, and yes, even sex educators have created accounts and sporadically tell the world what’s on their mind (or other bits) in 140 characters or less. Not to mention all those other “normal” people who use the service, too. The normal people tend to be the dirtier ones, by the way – they’re just harder to find.

(More. . ..)

Here are my slides from Monday’s talk at Conversio Virium. I spent much more time talking about sexual privacy than about setup and promotion. Thanks again to Elizabeth and MayMay for the opportunity to speak. This presentation is available on the Blogging page.

This Monday, November 17th, I’ll be doing an “Intro to Sex Blogging” talk at Conversio Virium, the student BDSM education and discussion group at Columbia University:

What is a blog? Should I have one? How do I set it up? How do readers find me? Should I write as myself, or under a pseudonym? This introductory workshop will provide tips and tools for setting up a blog, finding inspiration and writing well and building readership in this highly interactive medium.

Class info at the Conversio Virium site. Follow them on Twitter.

I’m going to talk about protecting your privacy, writing tips, platforms, and promotions. The handout will be posted afterwards.

What questions do you have about blogging that you’d like answered? Please leave comments below.

If you’re in New York, I hope you’ll attend!

. . . 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.

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Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days. This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react. You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots. Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.

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There is a new phenomenon in today’s information society, the anxiety of which becomes pervasive when one realizes the dangers and fragility brought upon by the interconnected Web 2.0 sphere. This is the problem of online oversharing: the tension in finding the right balance of what parts of one’s subjective identity should be put online. This is an anxious search, because, at first, it is understandably hard to realize that the internet is a totally new space with its own novel dynamics; any attempt to categorize it as public or private sphere or any of the classical categories would fail just as miserably as any attempt to introduce old-market commodity dynamics to the remix culture of intellectual property. As such, adapting to the new big Other of the internet becomes even harder.

How much should our online avatar, our novel cyber-embodiment, resemble our stupid, abrupt, physical identity of existence? Of course, we have all the big postmodern theories about how everything is no more than a simulacra, how reality and fantasy becomes blurred, that we live in a state of hyperreality, etc. But I think this idea is a little too naive for today’s society — rather than the blurring of fantasy and reality, is it not more true that the condition of our second embodiment, one I dubbed the monitor phase, calls for an inversion of fantasy? What I mean is quite simple: as our lives are today more and more lived on the other side of the screen, is it not, then, only logical that when the simulation is more real than the reality itself, reality becomes more and more like our fantasies?

Link

. . . If anonymous blogging is already writing for the drawer and this blog is a space for my most personal and difficult thoughts, then where do I write down the things that I can’t even say here? One solution is personal friendships. I have a friend that frequently sends me emails with pieces of writing and a subject line like, “I can’t blog this”. Sometimes he is correct. For social reasons or political ones or just “good taste”, he really can’t. Sometimes I convince him that he is wrong because I know his subject line is a challenge to both of us, of course he “can” blog it, but will he?

Me? I don’t even commit these dirtiest of thoughts to words in a publishable way. I may talk about them with friends or even allude to them on Twitter but the simple act of stringing words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs seems very risky and final to me. If I write and I don’t publish, I am admitting that the thoughts are unpublishable. And if I don’t publish the unpublishable, what am I doing here?

Link

caro:

There’s been a lot of blogger-to-blogger drama on the Internet recently (Baron v. Calacanis, Rambin v. Frangry, what-have-you) and it’s all made me think back to a time when I was 17 and royally pissed off my ice cream store co-worker’s girlfriend on LiveJournal. I’d ranted about how she was suspicious of me being friends with her boyfriend, and how it was so unfair that girlfriends assumed guys couldn’t just be friends with girls, and blah blah blah. As I recall, she proceeded to flood the comments section of the post with hate messages from her friends.

(Don’t bother searching for it. It was locked up years ago. But Maria probably knows the incident in question, and katiebakes has inevitably visited the establishment where all this wild teenage drama went down.)

The fact of the matter is, once I was even a year or two older I wouldn’t have wanted to air that sort of grievance on the Web, no matter how convinced I was that the girlfriend in question wouldn’t find it. (She did.) Oversharing the details of your life (Gyno exams! PMS! Grocery lists! Penis lengths!) is one thing; actively carrying out feuds for all to see is a whole different can of Sour Patch gummi worms.

So anyway, now we have this missive. I’d prefer not to make a judgment call on either side because I don’t know Chaya and only know Nick through work, I don’t know exactly what happened, and obviously this deals with an extremely sensitive matter that I hope the two of them can resolve with minimal pain and angst. But look at how it all unfolded! Plurk? Twitter direct messages? Tumblr? Gchat? Things were so much simpler when all we had were AIM and LiveJournal.

Just reading these things makes me feel awkward, as though I’ve inadvertently listened in on a phone call or read someone’s personal e-mails. But clearly there was an active choice in making something so deeply personal available to the public, whether it’s a cry for help or a call for attention or even an attempt to get the Interwebs to take sides.

I’m sorry. It’s just that Tumblr has started to feel like a middle school cafeteria as of late. Remember when you were at a pre-self-consciousness age and were willing to say just about anything about anyone without concern for the consequences? Apparently that just doesn’t go away now.

As a woman who has dabbled with bisexuality myself, and written about my sexual adventures both on my blog and in a couple of sexual memoirs, I can empathize with Jefferson. Not so long ago, one of the UK’s biggest mid-market tabloids and self-identified upholder of “family values” — the ultra-conservative Daily Mail — implied I was a bad mother simply because my children had expressed their wish that their friends not find out about my sexual exploits. I regularly receive emails from readers as well — curious, not necessarily accusatory — asking how my behavior has an impact on my children.

Suzanne Portnoy: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Jefferson: A Sex Blogger Fights for Custody of his Kids.

This week, the potential of the Internet to expose and disgrace when marriages fall apart came into stark relief as Tricia Walsh Smith, who is being divorced by Philip Smith, a theater executive, put a video on YouTube announcing that they never had sex, and yet she found him hoarding Viagra, pornography and condoms.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, David Aronson, called the video “appalling” and said: “Mr. Smith is a very private person. This is obviously embarrassing.”

But in an era when more than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, many people are using the Web to tell their side of a marital saga. Despite the legal end of a marriage, the confessions can stretch toward eternity in a steady stream of enraged or despondent postings.

In separation, of course, one person’s truth can be another’s lie. Often the postings are furtive. But even when the ex-spouse is well aware that he or she is starring in a blog and sues to stop it, recent rulings in New York and Vermont have showed the courts reluctant to intervene.

For the blogger, the writing can be therapeutic.

(more)

I tried embedding the slide show but it’s really throwing the template off.

Please go to the Slideshare site to view or download my presentation:

Everything You Need to Know about Being a Sexblogger (but were afraid to ask).

Funkybrownchick liveblogged my session. Thanks to her for allowing me to post her live blog on my site.  She embeds urls, pictures,  graphics from the session.