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.”
