Home

sex blogs

Blogging In the Pink Ghetto Does Have Its Own Rewards... But Still

Mon, 2009-01-05 16:36 — figleaf

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 And even out of date as it usually is my sidebar is still full of excellent sites, many of which I think would be great candidates in a sex-blog category.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.”

Why We Need More Sex Writers

Mon, 2008-04-07 11:53 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user peterpunk777. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY answers whether the world needs more sex writers.

The issue here, as far as I’m concerned, is not so much how many sex writers there are, but what kind of discourse we’re conducting about sex. The truth is, there’s only room for so many Carrie Bradshaws (ideally, none, or close to it): but Carrie Bradshaw is not the be-all, end-all, of sex writing.

To assume that writing about sex means writing about our own relationships, or writing solely about relationships, period, is to see sex as a limited, boring, sad little topic. That’s not the case, as far as I’m concerned: far from it. Sex is a vast, diverse, fascinating topic; an expansive area that’s ripe for exploration, discussion, and commentary (insightful and otherwise). The problem isn’t that we have too many sex writers; it’s that we have too limited an idea of what sex writing is.

Sex is everywhere, sex permeates everything. Sex shapes our movies, our music, our sports, our literature; sex drives our science and frames our political agendas. Sex is a huge part of our lives — and if we could just own up to that, and respect that, well, we could start having discussions about sex that are anything but tired, boring, or played out.

She said it here.

Agreed. The real question isn’t why write or blog about sex. I always say the real question is why aren’t more people doing it?

You see this a lot with people who fret that they’d be a bad sex blogger because their own sex lives aren’t that exciting, or because they don’t want to blog about their own sex lives, or because they haven’t had sex often enough (or, even, haven’t had it at all, or, even, don’t intend to have it till graduation or a certain age or marriage, or, even have no intention of ever having it at all.) Because there’s… look, there’s just more to sex than having sex!

Sex blogs: we're there, we're square, get used to it

Tue, 2007-10-23 20:57 — figleaf

(Via Viviane’s Sex Carnival)

Cory Silverberg of About.com:Sexuality has a heartfelt lament about the current state of sex blogging.

I have a deeply neurotic and fundamentally unhealthy relationship to blogs. I belong to a transitional technological demographic and while I read blogs voraciously for work, every click holds the possibility of sending me reeling into a fit of informational inadequacy. To top it all off, reading, writing and thinking about sex is work so virtually the only fun thing left for me about sex is actually having it. So in the end, I’m not really sure that I want more sex blogs as much as I might like more blogging about sex. But Susannah’s post made me realize that I haven’t thought much about what I’d actually want from a better sex blog.

  • A better sex blog would incite action.
  • A better sex blog would be less cool.
  • A better sex blog would reveal something about the reader and the blogger.
  • A better sex blog would be about everything, just like sex.
  • A better sex blog would be critical about sex.
  • A better sex blog would be subversive.

In his original post each bullet point is expanded into full detail. See the whole thing here.

On the one hand I could gently reassure Silverberg it’s not as bad as he fears, although on the other hand I could give him a cup of coffee and say perk up!

I think one issue with his lament is that — just as some people seem to think “sex” is limited to only PIV intercourse till male ejaculation — a lot of people think “sex blog” is limited to first-person accounts of their Saturday night down at the Stop ‘n Fight. Or something not far enough from that. But just as there’s way more to sex than having it there’s way more to sex blogging than blogging about having it.

Instead there are plenty of excellent, thoughtful blogs that hit each of the points you mention — calls to action; revelations about the writer and forced reflection by the reader; about not just the ins and outs of sex but also the politics, the sociology, the history, and the variety of sex; of critical commentary on the manias and conceits and blind spots of sex. Susie Bright, of course, manages rather nicely. And while I’m not crazy about his innovative but too-much-like-a-thumbnail-site design, Sam Sugar can too. Chelsea Girl and AlwaysArousedGirl each compellingly thread their sex lives through the greater fabric of the rest of their lives. CollegeCallgirl can knock your socks off. Same, though for different reasons, with The Beautiful Kind or Cassandra Says. And I don’t even think Bright, or Bank, or Collegegirl or TBK or the others are even necessarily the best non-Bridget-Jones blog out there. (I know I left a lot of good people out and besides… what’s wrong with Bridget-Jones-blogging anyway?) Anyway I did miss good sex bloggers but follow the links and you’ll find someone you like in one or more of the blogrolls you find.

If I can just beat my own drum for a moment, just since Friday I think I’ve posted about finding common ground between pro- and anti-porn feminists (over the role of agency) which is an invitation to action; I’ve posted about using instant mac-n-cheese powder as a (surprisingly harmless and flavor-appropriate) sexual flavor dust, which is just about as not cool as you can get; I’ve posted about cognitively-sound contrarian sex education tactics and parodies of evolutionary psychology, which — while not about everything just like sex — helps remind people that there’s more to sex than the old in-and-out; riffing off a Susie Bright review of a lame porn video I criticized the Johnny-Knoxville-ization of “gonzo” porn which is pretty critical of a direction away from actual sex people seem to be going with porn (and, sadly, viewers seem to be following); and finally I posted about what I believe is the deeply subversive indictment represented by the actual text (as opposed to the funny pictures) in Rachel P. Maine’s The Technology of Orgasm. And if I haven’t revealed something about myself in the last week I’m working on a post — one in a series — that’s about my own personal quest for “worthiness“ which, I contend, is for men comparable to the “beauty myth” phenomenon that affects women.

Heck, not to put too fine a point on it but Cory’s blog is a very good sex blog and his post was a wonderful example of the genre! You just gotta look a little.

So! Sex bloggers. We’re there, we’re sexy-but-square, get used to it! :-)

Syndicate content