A bit more on anonymity and outery while contemplating outlawery

Yesterday's post about anonymous blogging, blackmail, and The girl with a one-track mind's outing by a commercial journalist was a bit disjointed because I was shocked, a little upset, and already a little burned out from writing other posts.

So I missed a few points and I'd like to address that now.

Transitory anonymity: I believe, passionately, that the only difference between the majority of sex bloggers and the majority of everybody else is that sex bloggers *say what they're thinking!* With very few exceptions their thinking is no different from anyone else's. And sex bloggers *say what they're doing.* With very few exceptions what they're doing is no different from what everyone else is doing.

In short the only difference between your average sex blogger and, say, your average anybody else is that we don't just admit we have sex, we talk about it.

That small difference, however, can produce extraordinary results. The biggest result? Your average sex blogger no longer believes they're the only one who desires this, or dislikes that, or experienced the other. They no longer believe this because, with nearly a quarter of a billion people now able to surf the internet, they get feedback from people who've enjoyed, or endured, or recorded, or dealt with the same experiences. In other words you discover that you're your perfectly ordinary in wonderful ways.

And here's the deal about anonymity. The first blogger to admit she has a one-track mind about sex is probably going to raise eyebrows. Not because she's the only one with a one-track mind but because she's the first to *admit it!* Similarly a man who tries to represent straight men as a visually erotic objects in a way that's accessible to women (based on his observation that virtually all representations of men are made for other men either directly for men in gay porn or indirectly as surrogates or foils in heterosexual porn) then he's probably going to raise eyebrows. Not because he's the only one who wishes men could appear erotically to women but because so few others are willing to try it.

In both of those cases, and in hundreds or thousands more, the revelations can raise eyebrows but, again, not because of what's revealed (*what's* revealed is often quite conventional) but because it's the first time anyone's tried to admit it.

But here's the thing: I've said that when it comes to sex sex-bloggers are, almost without exception, no different from anyone else. And I've said that to the extent we raise eyebrows it tends not to be what we're saying so much as that what we're saying is being said *for the first time in public.*

And what I'm saying now is that if convenient and maybe even necessary to be anonymous while we're all first saying perfectly ordinary things about sex. I like to get blowjobs. Someone else likes to shag on the job. Someone here thinks his cock is too big or too small, someone there thinks her breasts are too small or too big, and so on and so on.

But sooner or later enough people will have said things that are true for enough of everybody else that it'll lose it's novelty-induced ability to shock.

In the Victorian era people were expected to join the French Foreign Legion if it was discovered they'd had a divorce, or an affair, or gotten a blowjob, or drunkenly danced naked on bars well into their 30's. In the modern era, however, people who've had divorces (Reagan) affairs (Bush I) or blowjobs (Clinton) or alcoholic binges (Bush II) have become the last four presidents of the United States of America!

Similarly, I would argue, while people might still go around raising eyebrows at perfectly ordinary revelations about our sex lives (sex lives, remember, that are probably very little different from those of the eyebrow-raisers) there will come a tipping point past which acknowledging that you enjoy what you enjoy will be interesting, yes, but extraordinary or eyebrow-raising, no.

At that point our anonymity will tend to lose its utility and become far more quaint than edgy.

TheGirl: She hasn't given up. She didn't pull her blog and instead engaged the topic not only in her blog but in a guest editorial in the Independent, a major British newspaper. A *paper* newspaper at that :-)! I admire her so much for standing up instead of cutting and running.

As I said yesterday I think it's disgraceful not that her anonymity was pointlessly violated but that she was outed before her anonymity had served its purpose. That *is* thoroughly disgraceful, though, and now she's catching shit she shouldn't have had to catch.

And how do I resolve my belief that anonymity should be transitory with my dismay that TheGirl has been outed? Because of an even deeper belief -- a core belief: consent trumps all. It should be up to the individual to out him or herself no matter how quaint or antiquated the notion ever becomes. There's absolutely no evidence TheGirl consented to anything, and though (as I theorize) the ultimate consequences to her family or career may not be very high, it still should have been *her fucking decision* when or whether to come out. The reporter who scammed her name into the public domain was out of line.

And, finally, in yesterday's post I mentioned blackmail and stalking and bloggers who go dark.

To my certain knowledge close to a dozen sex bloggers have gone dark in the last year because they were threatened by people who tracked them, stalked them, discovered their identities, and contacted them in an intimidating or even directly threatening manner. Some of these individuals have sent innocuous-seeming messages to sex-blogger's partners or employers or their children's schools as a way to indicate how much embarrassment they can cause. Sometimes they've been classic stalkers operating with classic "I just want to meet you" crushes. Sometimes, more ominously, their intention is to blackmail the blogger into going dark! (I can only wonder how long till someone does it in order to get their own site promoted -- there are certainly a few *very* aggressive semi-commercial bloggers these days!)

Anyway, yesterday I mentioned that stalkers and blackmailers rely on the assumption that your fear of embarrassment will trump their fear of going to jail. Let me clarify that a bit.

Let's say you're an anonymous sex-blogger working, for instance, as a programmer for a children's show on public television. Let's further imagine that a stalker or blackmailer who's somehow or other gotten the goods on you makes a demand that you do x, y, or z or they'll contact your employers.

Well, that *could* be pretty bad. This year. But, I'm arguing, it may not be bad next year or the year after. In fact, as we're about to discover via ThatGirl's unfortunate example, it may not be that bad this year.

By bad, by the way, I mean you might be forced to look for another job. (Or perhaps worse, another partner if the threatened revelation involves an affair.)

Here's the thing though: Cyber-stalking is a serious crime in most states. If your cyber-stalker lives across a state line then their stalking may also be a federal crime.

Here's the thing though: Blackmail all by itself is a very serious crime. It's a federal crime. It's a state crime in, as far as I know, every state in the U.S. It's a serious crime most countries in Western Civilization.

Readers with a law-enforcement background can back me up here, but blackmail, at least, is subject to at least a seven-year statute of limitations.

That suggests that long after your anonymity becomes irrelevant, after you've changed jobs or reconciled with your partner, your blackmailer will still be subject to prosecution!

For that matter, if anyone in England in the last two years tried to threaten TheGirl with exposure I'm guessing their ass may be grass today.

And if for any reason you decide to out yourself in, say, the next five or six years, then the ass of anyone who's tried to stalk or blackmail you may also be grass.

In fact, if I ever got outed, and if someone had so much as sent snippy email suggesting they'd even tried to track me down in real life, I'd probably waste no time at all posting everything they ever sent me, including the headers of their emails, including my server logfile entries of their accesses.

In fact, if I might not even wait to be outed. Since I try very hard to follow my own blogging guidelines (speaking that which I would speak, revealing that which I would reveal, saying that which is either true or pretty close to what I think happened) I think the downside for them would be far worse than the downside for me.

(For instance, even if the offense was not deemed prosecutable, were the offender an aspiring semi-commercial blogger him or herself it's unlikely his or her links would remain long in anyone else's blogrolls once word got out of stalking or blackmailing other bloggers. For instance.)