Image source unknown -- found on a hard drive archive ca ~2005

While browsing my server logs I found a link from the password-only forum I participated heavily in before I started this blog back in January of 2005. Someone had looked up my profile and found the link I left there when I started posting here instead.

In the past people have asked, wondered, and downright questioned why I use "figleaf" and why I don't capitalize it. (This evidently drives some people crazy.) As luck would have it, here are the thoughts that were going through my head back on Sunday, May 13th, 2001, at around 10:52 AM Pacific Time, about two minutes after coming up with the name.

A fig leaf covers only a little bit but lets you feel comfortable showing the rest.

I don't mind people knowing about my own habits and preferences. But discussing them necessarily reveals stuff about friends and partners who might not care to be identified. Thus the pseudonym.

You can easily find out who I am. (For instance you could email me and I'll probably answer.) But I'd prefer you didn't.

In other words I thought of "figleaf" as more of a description than a name.  So at the time I didn't capitalize it then.  By the time I started this blog I was capitalizing it out of habit.

So anyway, no e.e. cummings tribute, no emulation of bell hooks either.  Just a two-second decision almost eleven years ago(!!!) when I decided to start writing about the politics, sociology, and experience of sex.

Meanwhile, though, I've been doing this for eleven years?  No wonder I've slowed down a bit! :-)