Generally when you hear a dirty limerick, you’ve heard it a thousand times before. This one was new to me:

“I like anal sex, if you please”
Said Ginger while down on her knees
“I’m firm and I’m tight,
I’m an utter delight!
And I promise that I won’t cut the cheese!”

Ladies and gentlemen and faithful readers and visitors, I’m pleased to announce that today marks the fifth anniversary of ErosBlog’s first post.

I’m rather proud to have been in continuous publication for half a decade. 1,853 posts spread over 1,825 days averages to 1.015 posts per day. Of course it wasn’t that regular — there are a couple of posting gaps that stretch close to a month in length. But a daily post has always been the goal, and if I never managed that much, I’ll settle for that 1.015 posts-per-day average.

When I started this thing, internet diaries had been around for at least as long as the web, and some of them (especially the BDSM lifestyle ones) had a lot of adult content. Blogs (known by that name, or by its then-still-in-use linguistic ancestor, “weblogs”) were a few years old, but had exploded in popularity and visibility just in the previous year. Sex blogs — as a genre — were unheard of. There was Daze Reader, there was World Sex News, there was BJ’s Gay Porno-Crazed Ramblings. There were pretty pictures every day at Sensual Liberation Army and some other places. Lots of proto-sex-blogs, but none that had adopted that characterization of themselves. So, as far as I know, Eros Blog was the first internet thing to claim that description.

I can’t claim to have invented the idea of a sex blog — whomever registered sexblog.com, before I tried to, can prove that — and I can’t claim to have invented the act of sex blogging, which was all over LiveJournal before I ever heard of blogging. But I think I was the first person, to think of it, do it, and call it by the name.

One possible exception — a sex blogger who was there before me by a few months, doing what I’d consider the first recognizable sex blog and conceptualizing her work in roughly that way, was Susannah Breslin. She did a blog called The Reverse Cowgirl, she was well connected with web heavyweights and early blogging gurus, and she blogged pretty exclusively about sex and culture. It was nice stuff, she was kind enough to link me early, but I simply cannot remember if she ever called her project a sex blog. She might have; certainly she could have, because that’s what it was.

Unfortunately it was from Susannah that I first learned to hate the destruction wrought by blog vandalism. She was linked all over the web, she was getting a lot of media attention, and then one day without a word of explanation her blog was gone and links all over the blogosphere were 404ing. Then a while later she had another project up, very artistic and overdesigned but having many bloglike features; it too vanished. After that I lost track, but there have been more; she’s got another “Reverse Cowgirl” blog going at the moment, with archives going all the way back to 2006, but not a single link to any of her earlier projects (presumably because they are all gone). I owe Susannah a considerable debt for inspiration and early traffic, but she’s also the one who taught me to be wary of folks who treat the web like a rented space for temporary performance art.

So! Five years. Two hosts. Three blog software platforms. At least half a dozen different templates. A metric buttload of spam and raging idiocy moderated out of the comments. Two web interviews, perhaps half a dozen press inquiries (ignored because I still enjoy psuedonymous posting). One hell of a lot of fun.

One of the fun things for me is to look at how my posts (and me) have changed over five years. When I started, writing about sexual stuff was very hard for me (even in my usual detached “look at those people over there and what they say they are doing” style). I was stilted and awkward. I was afraid that to write about a thing meant people would think I liked it. Worse yet, I cared about that, and would include horrid little disclaimers. Bacchus wrote about Bacchus in the third person for eight long months. I remain indebted to Eugene Volokh for providing me, a day too late, with the vocabulary word for that literary atrocity. Thanks to him, I now understand that I Am No Longer An Illeist.

As for me, when I started this blog I was single, lonely, and underemployed by my own choice due to increasing disillusionment with my profession (a little) and with the demands of the job culture (a lot). Now I’ve got The Nymph, we’re ridiculously happy together, and my adult web projects support me better than a job ever did, with me working only when it suits me. And it does suit me! I used to read in the business magazines about successful power suit types who would wake up in the morning full of enthusiasm for getting into the office to do whatever they did, and I’d boggle at that alien worldview. Now, I wake up in the morning, often as not, with an idea for tweaking or improving one of my websites, and I’m full of enthusiasm for the idea of getting up and tinkering with it. Life has never been better.

I couldn’t hope to thank properly all the other bloggers who deserve it, for providing me with support, encouragement, linkage, ideas, material, inspiration… but to list even the first fraction of them would require listing half my blog roll. All I can say is, thanks to you all. And thanks — even more thanks! — to the thousands of loyal readers who come back every day to see my blather and follow my links.

I owe special thanks to my regular guest blogger, Aphrodite, who has been backing me up and providing the woman’s touch around here for more than three years. Although her posts have never been frequent, she’s provided considerable invisible assistance, especially with comment spam filtering before we got it as automated as it tends to be today. I remain delighted and honored to have her help.

What about the future? Will there be a “Ten Candles” post on October 3, 2012?

At the speed technology, culture, and politics are changing in this crazy world, it’s hard to know for sure, but I truly do hope so! I love doing this blog and I can’t imagine stopping voluntarily. Five years ago it was still possible to claim that blogs were a fad. Five years from now, it’s possible we’ll all be considered impossibly old-fashioned, like paper magazines and network television and phones that plug into the wall. But this is about the sex, baby! And people don’t get bored with that, so I should still have an audience.

I’ll conclude with a list of some of my forgotten favorites — an even dozen sex blog posts I enjoyed writing and still enjoy reading, posts that seemed important to me, or posts that other people seemed particularly to enjoy.

• Bacchus On Porn
• Andrea Dworkin On Blowjobs
• This Is The Culture War
• Competing With Porn
• A Basic Rule For Gentlemen
• Sex And Submission
• Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked
• Crapping All Over Beauty
• Two Smiles
• An Economist Confused About Porn
• More on NSFW
• Blogging Services Still Haven’t Stopped Sucking

Whatever one’s opinions on the practicality of actual auto-cunnilingus for real women with non-folding spines, you ought to enjoy this bit of French art featuring a dirty old man in a well-equipped kitchen assisting “the help” with the necessary contortion:

I don’t have the French to translate the caption, but some bits are fairly clear. You have to admit that le suçage solitaire sounds much better (and much dirtier) than the clinical medical faux-latin “autocunnilingus”.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Can't Get Your Salad Tossed?
• Autofellatio
• Autocunnilingus?
• Interview With An Autofellator

It has to be said: People are funny about their kinks. They want the kink, but sometimes they don’t want to own up to the sex part. They don’t like to admit that they do what they do because it makes them horny and leads to great sex.

In the realm of bondage, one way people sometimes display this curious hesitance is to treat bondage as if it were a sort of performance art. They wax lyrical about the aesthetics of the thing, do bondage displays in public venues with strict rules against any sort of sex play, and create highly stylized photography featuring beautiful bondage models like Roma, here, tied up with almost all of her clothes on:

Which, in my view, is mostly bunk. It leads to some breath-taking bondage photography, sure. But when a man ties up a woman’s breasts with that much care, it’s for one reason only. The reason? So she can’t bat away his hands when he does this:

Now, that’s what I call getting a good squeeze!

(Of course, those particular hands actually belong to Claire Adams, as you can see in the full gallery from Whipped Ass. No matter, it’s still a good squeeze.)

In the movies and the stories and the fantasies, if you order up a stranger off the internet for perverted sex, and meet for perverted sex, then the story is about perverted sex. Predictably, and sometimes boringly, so.

What I love about sex blogging is that down here on earth in real life, sometimes other stuff happens too, which makes for a more varied and interesting narrative.

For instance, when Bitchy Jones whistled up a submissive feller off the internet so she could do mean stuff to him, there was indeed some perverted sex, but not without a hitch you’ll never see in a dirty movie:

Just before Jack was due to arrive one of my next door neighbours came and told me they had seen my cat limping in the street. I went out to look for cat but there was no sign. I called Pan in a panic. I told him to turn around and come home so he could care for cat. It started to rain. I was standing in the street looking for the cat when Jack arrived.

Jack was all, ‘Hey are you standing in the street waiting for me?‘ And also all, ‘Hey, here I am. I have arrived for perverted sex.‘

And I was all, ‘No. Perverted sex is canceled. We must find lost injured cat ZOMGZ!‘

We found the cat. (Sorry if that stressed you — I probably should have warned at the top for mild cat peril.) I called Pan and told him I thought the cat would be okay until morning and that he should not come home after all.

Then Jack cooked. I kissed him quite a lot — endangering cooking. We did some painful things too. (Painful for him.) Some naked things. (Naked for him.) Some kneeling things. (Kneeling… (oh, get with it.))

I don’t know if his tongue stud felt so very different on my cunt — but on my nipples it was incredible. Bliss of death.

I love it. “Perverted sex is canceled!”

Enlightened men these days know better than to expect a woman to do their laundry. (Although, I must confess, The Nymph is so horrified by my “if it didn’t survive the hot cycle with my other clothes, I didn’t need to own it anyway” laundry philosophy that she doesn’t let me touch so much as a dirty sock these days.)

“Expect” is one thing. “Appreciate” is quite another:

From FEMJOY.

Mistress Matisse has some observations on making real money (“money to live comfortably, buy a house, create a retirement fund, build some security”) in the sex business:

If you want to make good money in the sex industry, then you need to do two things. One: get in the room with the client, and two: eliminate the middleman.

That means that any form of sex work you do which does not place you in the room with a client should be viewed as temporary and prone to marked fluctuations. Nice extra money, but not to be exclusively relied on to make you a steady, long-term living. So, phone sex, modeling, peep-shows, cam sites, and yes, porn videos — that kind of work can provide a continuous small trickle of money into your pocket, or it can occasionally inject a large wad of cash into your budget. But while I know a lot of people in the sex industry, I don’t personally know anyone who has made a decent living exclusively from such avenues for any long period of time.

(And no, the photographer who pays you to model for commercial publication is the not the client. He’s a middle-man. The guy who buys the magazine or joins the paysite is the client.)

The money in those gigs is a bit better if you own the venue. There was a window of time in which mom-and-pop porn sites could do pretty well. But unfortunately I think that era is over – between the federal government regulations, and the expansion of the corporate porn industry, a lot of indie porn sites have been muscled out of business, or at least out of the black.

As a middleman myself, or what’s worse, a middleman’s middleman, the guy who sells advertising to middlemen or sends them traffic, I can’t agree more with her “temporary and prone to marked fluctuations” characterization. “Eliminate the middleman” is the plain English, the $100 word from B-school is “disintermediation”, and I noticed long ago that without constant vigilance and a ready flexibility, I’m never more than six months away from being disintermediated right out of business. The internet is the great disintermediator, it brings the clients and the talent together in a way that makes middlemen increasingly seem irrelevant.

As an aside, this disintermediation effect means that indie porn continues to thrive, but at a lower level of visibility. How many indie camgirls are there out there, who hook up with clients on Craig’s List and turn on their webcams after he PayPals them forty bucks? I dunno. Neither do you. The biggest remaining barrier on the internet is the payment middleman — PayPal will kill that transaction if it can spot it. Of course, if you can literally get in the room with the client, good old fashioned folding cash money still works.

Matisse concludes:

So if you want to make a good living in the sex industry, my advice is: Set up your own shop, run the business yourself, and deal with your clients directly and personally. Don’t be fodder in someone else’s money machine.

And that’s advice you can take to the bank, in the sex industry or any other.

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