Looks like voting has begun on the biggie of weblog awards, the, well, Weblog Awards. And once again there’s no category for sex blogs. Not even blogs like this one that are a lot more about the politics and sociology of sex than about things one does, has done, or can do with his, hers, or ter’s moistey frictiony bits.
Oddly they’ve got an LGBT category, which is actually pretty nice of them: It’ll be hard to choose between Pam’s House Blend since Pam (who also blogs at Pandagon) rocks on politics at the intersection of orientation, gender, and race, and Susie Bright’s Journal since while Susie certainly blogs about LGBT issues she actually blogs about Teh Sex in all its dimensions including L, B, G, T, A(sexual), and S(traight.)
But alas I’m not so much an LGBT blogger — the (functional and dysfunctional) conniptions of heterosexuality being both interesting enough and, more to the point, dire enough to keep me busy nearly almost full time. Since I blog a fair amount about feminism (or perhaps more accurately about anti-feminism and anti-anti-feminism) there might have been room for Real Adult Sex in a feminism category. But alas while there are thousands of feminist blogs, and hundreds of excellent ones, there’s no category for those either.
There’s also a Best Culture Blog category, but that seems more appropriate to The Cool Hunter or Art of Manliness’s articles like How to Shave Like Your Grandpa than this blog or, say, Andrea Zanin’s Sexgeek.
True, in 2006 sex-blogger par excellence Zoe Margolis’s Girl With a One Track Mind won an award in the Best UK or Irish Blog category but, alas again, this isn’t a UK blog nor was hers a WeblogAwards award (hers was from The Bloggies. So that’s out.
And since I’m coming up on my fourth (or is it fifth?) anniversary it’s way, way too late to land a Best New Blog award but there are… well… too many great new sex-and-sexuality blogs this year to even imagine picking what my first choice would be.
So…
Kind of a bummer there’s nothing for us. It’s not like sex is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And even out of date as it usually is my sidebar is still full of excellent sites, many of which I think would be great candidates in a sex-blog category. If only someone wanted to host a category for them.
Oh well, we know who we are. For that matter they know who we are! And if they’re uncomfortable unrecognizing us we’ll have to recognize each other. Hats off (at the very least) to everyone willing to do good work here in the “pink ghetto.”
Z of The Naked Truth says
The other day, someone said to me that this is not a sex blog, it’s an emotion blog. Is it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a sex-through-a-veil-of-emotion blog, or an emotion-through-a-veil-of-sex-blog, or it’s more of a relationship blog than a sex one, mainly detailing the close and generally fulfilling one between my body and my head.
Funny how you never hear people say “well, he’s not a real a food blogger” or “You couldn’t really call her a transportation policy blogger.”
Something similar popped up in comments when The Ethical Slut discussed vulvodynia, a decidedly sex-related topic for her because it was getting in the way of (ok, effectively wrecking) her ability to enjoy intercourse. The commenter said “Wow, the writing here has gotten to be a bit of a downer. Meh. Buh bye.”
Anyway, I got a little lightbulb reading Z’s post though and I think maybe the distinction isn’t sex vs. non-sex blogs but sex vs. reliable-wank-material blogs. (And by the way I think TES’s retort to her commenter supports my contention.)
Anyway this is all kind of a nuisance. On the one hand you’re not a “sex blogger” if you don’t reel off your nightly encounters. Meanwhile for everyone else if you use any of the Carlin words it’s off to the pink ghetto, never to be seen by Google or Ad-Sense again.