Speaking as the person who claims to have invented the notion of the “sex blog” and as the first person to refer to my efforts as “sex blogging”, I must say Dangerous Lilly has done a very nice job of pulling together a “view from 10,000 feet” overview of sex blog history in her article A Brief History Of Sex Blogging. I inspected each urge to quibble that arose within myself as I read the piece and in each case the only possible fair assessment was “if she’d spent the space to sort out that detail, then it wouldn’t have been a brief history any more.” I say, good work.

That said, I was a quibbler and a pettifogger long before I was a sex blogger, and some old habits die way hard. So here are a couple of points I would make about the older bits of sex blog history in her piece. (Everything in this post is “as far as I know” — it’s always possible somebody more knowledgeable or with a better memory will pull up proof of my internet wrongness, in which case, better history, awesome!)

  1. Susannah Breslin’s blog The Reverse Cowgirl’s Blog (which you might or might not consider a sex blog, though it had a lot of sex-blog-like content, and rocked the subtitle “in which a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection” ) got started a month plus five days before ErosBlog did. That’s why I have always acknowledged that blog as a possible contender for “the first sex blog” even though nobody called it a sex blog before I first coined the phrase.
  2. Before I ever came along, Violet Blue was writing sex book and video reviews for the Good Vibrations sex toy store as her day job, while posting handcrafted HTML pages by night that today look a lot like sex blog posts. That started perhaps in 2001. But I didn’t discover her actual blog of dated posts in reverse order (which she called “a tiny log”) until sometime in May or June of 2003, and the first post I can find in her archives is dated February 16, 2003. Whether or not you consider Violet a “sex blogger” before she started publishing dated posts, she was doing essentially that thing (only more and better) long before I was.
  3. I believe Lilly must be using a different definition of “sex toy reviews on blogs” than I am when she dates her oldest evidence of them to 2005. My guess is — and I haven’t asked her — that she’s talking about the current “manufacturer provides toy contingent upon a review, which review will also have the reviewer’s affiliate link in it” review model. Certainly I thought this was a sex toy review when I posted it in early 2004, and I didn’t have any notion of doing a novel thing when I did it. (Note that there were product links in the post originally, that later got edited out when the links broke.) At about the same time, I posted for the humor value about a review series in which one Cly Maxwell received “two huge boxes of [rubber] pussy” in exchange for a promise to review these fake pussies at the rate of one per week, which he then began to do. My memory is that the “bloggers review sex toys in exchange for getting them free in the mail” model got going prior to July of 2003, but it’s hard to separate in my memory the VHS/DVD porn review offers from sex toys, which may have been slower to arrive in the mail.

I’ll stop there — that’s quite enough quibbling for any mortal man. Kudos to Lilly for tackling a difficult bit of 21st-century cultural history with both brevity and aplomb!

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