More Sex Blog History
Following up on my post about sex blog history (and my semi-dubious claim to have invented the “sex blogging” notion, even though I’ve always acknowledged that others were doing it long before me, under different names) here’s what I said last week:
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.
Here’s what Susannah has to say about that:
As I pointed out on Twitter this morning, I was preceded in sex blogging by Daze Reader, whose first blog post dates back to May 2002. I didn’t launch The Reverse Cowgirl until August 2002. I’ve always seen Daze as the first sex blogger. I don’t know that I would’ve ever created my blog if it weren’t for Daze’s pioneering sex blogging.
In regards to Lilly’s question, would I consider The Reverse Cowgirl blog a sex blog? Yes. At the time, I was a freelance journalist and my primary beat was sex. I created the RCB to share my crazy life working the sex and porn beat, from Porn Valley to the Playboy Mansion, and I was intoxicated by the opportunity that sex blogging afforded me: an uncensored venue where I could write and express whatever I wanted — without censorship.
I am abashed that Daze did not come up in the “early sex blog” conversation before now; he was one of my inspirations for sure. I don’t remember him calling his blog a “sex blog” out loud anymore than Susannah did, but by any reasonable measure, it surely was. During that summer of 2002 when I was surfing blogs on breaks at my desk at my unrewarding office job — and yes, there was a logging Sonic Firewall device in that workplace, but I had the password and thus the ability to confirm that nobody else was logging in check the logs — Daze was one of my never-miss daily stops.
Another proto-sexblog mentioned on twitter as dating back to August of 1999 (!) is Debra Hyde’s Pursed Lips. I was linking to Debra from the beginning; her focus, as I remember it, was somewhat specialized around erotic literature, both writing it and collecting it. (Sadly, nothing of her site from before 2004 or so seems to have survived in the Internet Archives.) The most recent archived version of her “About” page says:
I’m a long-time blogger and sometimes podcaster. Pursed Lips is among the oldest blogs to bravely explore sex in our culture, a baby I birthed in 1999 when bloggers numbered around 200 people!
It’s astonishing how ephemeral these sites turn out to be. The Internet Archive helps a lot, but their coverage in the early years was spotty at best. And you can’t search it, so if you don’t already have a link, even stuff in the Archive is as good as gone in most cases.
Update, Debra Hyde on Twitter: “I saw PL as a sexblog, tho not sure the term yet existed.”
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=11633
Will be linking to this from mine again. The post is growing. Like Flubber.
While I still maintain that my personal endeavor was not to try and include every single site along the way (a fact that a few missed, I’ve had a couple people think it was a personal snub that I didn’t mention them) “I’ve left out a lot to focus more on how we got from Violet Blue & Erosblog to sex toy giveaways galore and flying cross country to hang out at conferences.”, digging through the hive mind to end up at the beginning is proving very educational. This seems to be turning into a group project of the loosest definition, which is pretty cool.
Yup! It’s impossible to mention (or remember) everybody. My habit for many years of removing dead links doesn’t make splelunking in my old archives any easier, either.
I do have to confess, a lot of the more recent history of interest to you is obscure to me, because as a personal matter, my eyes began to glaze over when sex toy reviews got really popular. So, for a long time my heuristic for linking to and following new blogs included an “are there more then two sex toy reviews on the front page” filter; I didn’t read those blogs as a rule and missed out on a lot of cool stuff in consequence.
And some of the early blogs I liked a lot (like Red Sneaker Diaries, which just turned ten, and which should have been mentioned sooner in this discussion) I stopped reading when the sexy content got rare and the latest sex toy review would sit on the top of the page for weeks or months at a time.
[…] And because one day, this digital age of sex bloggin will be charmingly vintage… Dangerous Lilly started the conversation on sex blogging history; Bacchus at Eros is keeping the conversation alive. […]
I found Reverse Cowboy and Eros Blog through links on Fleshbot. Probably in 2005.
Here’s to you and to you again,
If I hadn’t met you, what I might have been,
But now that I’ve met you and let you —
I’ll bet you I’ll let you again.
[…] More Sex Blog History at Eros […]
It is funny that Adult BackWash is not given credit for being among the early sex blog sites. I started writing on the adult side in 2002.
But, from what I can find on the Wayback Machine the adult side began in 2000. At that time there was only one writer and he was gone (or had changed his name?) when I started.
We had a nice community. I’ve kept in touch with one of the other bloggers all these years. I’ve tried to find a few others now and then but, with pen names, it’s not so simple.
Anyway, it would be nice to have our contributions recognized in your history of sex bloggers. I even had a newsletter for Sex Bloggers back then, through the site. Maybe we don’t count because we were on a communal site, but we were all individuals with our own blogs about sex.
The simplest answer is that I simply was not aware of Adult Backwash at the time, and when I became aware of it, I probably didn’t ever parse it as blogging the way I understood the word back then. The community part was not the issue; in that it was no different than livejournal or diaryland or any of dozens of other writing platforms that offered features to preference interaction between writers on the platform. But to me, in the early years, blogs were chunks of text called posts, presented in reverse chronological order, with external links to other blogs presented in a sidebar.
At Adult Backwash, y’all had undated columns that don’t seem to have had a chronological connection each to the next, and columnists, an overarching structure that was presenting as a sort of web magazine community, none of the chronological presentation of blogs, and none of the out-linking engagement with other bloggers that I understood to be a feature of blogging.
Please understand that fifteen years onward I do “get” that this is all totally arbitrary. I’m doing archaeology on my own concept of what a sex blog was at the time, not trying to define it for anybody else. It leaves me in a poor position to credit the contributions y’all made, since I wasn’t aware of them at the time and am barely aware of them now. But I do appreciate the link and the contribution here in the comments!