It has suddenly dawned on me that by early next October, ErosBlog will have been up for a full ten years. There most likely will not be a parade.

However, I did think it might be fun, from time to time as the year progresses, to dip into the most ancient archives and pull out a few of the more interesting posts. There’s no specific schedule for this; we’ll just see how it goes.

Herewith, some fun posts from 2002:

• Inaugurating my tradition of shamelessly reblogging sexy excerpts from other blogs was a bit by Anil Dash explaining what fancy hand-held shower nozzles are really for: Because Then She Won’t USE It
• A very dirty animated cartoon, one of the first .gifs to make it onto ErosBlog: And Making Sure It Stays Clean
• A fun recipe for the ultimate aphrodisiac for married women, concluding with a jokey flourish: Sex Potion #9.
• Perhaps ErosBlog’s first foray into celebrity gossip, in the form of a press acount about the Spice Girl who enjoyed a good sex spanking: Spanking A Spice Girl For Jesus
• Who can forget the words of the Prophet Mohammed (a serious true quote as far as I could tell at the time, but subject as always to the perils of translation) approving of rear-entry sex as long as it wasn’t up the butt: From Behind, But In The Front
• The first serious rant on ErosBlog, I do believe: Bardex — The Rectal Catheters For Assholes
• The unforgettable story of a wife who put candy in her pussy, and the husband who didn’t go in after it: “Husband, A Towel! Lickety-Split!“
• The first discussion of a male sex toy on ErosBlog: The Fleshlight: Better Living Through Technology
• Still the hilariously worst book title ever, after all these years: The Dangers Of Self-Publishing
• My first effort to grapple with the ethics of blogging about stories that involve real world sexual atrocity (like Uday Hussein and his pony girls) but which also contain elements of what I’d call fetish fuel nowadays (though I didn’t have the phrase back in 2002): The Uses Of Pornography
• And finally for now, some good clean dirty fun, in the form of a link to the slashy notional diaries of LoTR characters: I’ll Never Look At Carrots The Same Way Again

I’m so glad nobody can make me cough up a list of the early blog posts that I’m the most sheepish about…

Sometimes you find unexpected stuff in unexpected places. I happened to follow a link to a random spanking blog and there I found a man blogging in an unexpectedly raw way about his mortality and his marriage:

The years seem to get shorter and pass with frightening regularity. When I look back and think that my time ahead is much smaller than those behind; just take a look at my butt that proves it. So to sum up I have been feeling that my days are numbered and if I am going to do anything sooner would be better than later.

Then he shares a vivid spanking fantasy, but when he gets to the part where he checks to see if the woman he’s spanking is aroused:

At this point I think that I am straying into forbidden territory. I have been married for 14 years and have vowed that I would keep certain promises. I do not remember anywhere in that contract that would forbid me from spanking a pretty bottom. If my handiwork left my friend even slightly aroused and or excited this could be a problem. I have to admit that aroused may be pushing it a bit, at this time I would be happy if she were amused or even a little irritated.

I really believe that sex and spanking go together very nicely, you know like a horse and carriage, but I did sign on for monogamy. I did not agree to be celibate and if the only choice I have is celibacy or cheating well I have had enough of celibacy.

…

I like to believe that I have a few good years left in me, maybe more. For too many years now I have been closed to any possibilities. I even negotiated this blog. My wife thought that it might just increase my “unnatural desires”. She may have been right about that, not the unnatural part but by writing and reading posts from like minded people I am feeling that there are more possibilities and I am not finished yet.

For what it’s worth, my own years as a sex blogger have convinced me that, yes, reading and writing in a community of like-minded sex-positive people does tend to alter our views of sexuality, making us much more comfortable with our own desires and kinks, and confirming our innate sense that we’re good enough and smart enough and sexually likable enough that we not only deserve, but can get and are righteous to expect, sexual fulfillment in life. In my view, a spouse who is eager to preserve a marriage but determined to remain sexually ungenerous (or who is, to put it Dan Savage’s way, unwilling to be “good, giving, and game“) should indeed be concerned that sex blogging by the other party might eventually undermine this ambition.

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The world needs more alternative key caps to liven up its boring QWERTY keyboards. Like, for instance, this spank button:

Found via the fine weekly spanking links update that Chross publishes every week, and which you simply cannot afford to miss if you like spanking stuff.

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The words I wrote six and a half years ago to celebrate the launch of Sex and Submission seem almost naive, now:

If you like your sex at all kinky, you’ll have noticed that genuinely kinky hard core porn is very hard to find. Bondage and spanking photos are a dime a dozen, but how often do you see a pretty woman in a leather collar with her wrists tied giving a big sloppy enthusiastic blowjob? Or bouncing happily up and down on some male porn star prong with her wrists clipped to the D-rings on her collar?

I’m not saying you can’t find it, but it’s not common and it’s rarely commercial.

Not only has the commercial production of explicitly-sexual BDSM porn exploded since I wrote that, but a great deal of stuff that already existed in obscure physical-format publications has found its way onto the web since then. And the web has continued to do its webby thing, constantly shuffling up and exposing to public view deep layers of our cultural history that were well-buried and almost completely invisible just a few years ago. So what once seemed radically uncommon now seems (in retrospect) to have been all over the place. Of course, it never actually was “all over the place”; it existed but it wasn’t available in any practical sense.

I was reminded of this by an old Europorn magazine cover I just encountered on Tumblr. The magazine is called Perverted Orgies #3 and the cover features a woman in bondage being screwed from behind while she sucks another man’s dick, while two more men fumble with details of her bondage. (You can see it here for however long the Tumblr link may last.)

I first saw that image before there was a World Wide Web. It was floating around on the Usenet image groups, in the form of a tiny little .gif about 250 pixels wide. It was a rectangle with an oval mask, so the actual image area was an oval about 200 pixels wide by maybe 110 pixels tall. But there was no way to tell that it was a magazine cover or what magazine cover it was — and even if you knew, the magazine it came from was doubtless long out of print, available only in the physical store of a dealer in old porn, if you could find one in your locale who had one of the sure-to-have-been-a-small-number that were ever printed.

The internet didn’t have a thing to do with the creation of this image. It’s older than the internet. But somebody with a primitive scanner liberated a low-resolution version of this “item of culture” from the bonds of paper, way back in the late 1980s, and put it on the internet. And then, with the marches of time and progress, somebody else with a better scanner did it again, in high resolution with better color fidelity, less cropping, and better preservation of the limited provenance info that is inherent to the magazine cover. And now the daily churn and ferment of the modern web brings it to the surface, from time to time and place to place, where it’s likely to be spotted, in time, by most everybody who is interested in seeing a thing like that. And I’ll wager (though I have not done the exercise) that a few minute’s effort spent typing that magazine information into torrent search engines would yield a more-or-less complete scan of the magazine.

For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape. But that’s a project that seems only to be accelerating. No day passes when I do not marvel at some internet find, some cultural treasure that “I can’t believe somebody put this on the internet!” But they do, and they (the whole world!) do more with every day that passes.

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Here’s something that a reader recently mentioned to me as an example of the sort of conversation over time (covering most of a century, if you squint at it just so) that may be unique to the blogging world. Way back in 2003 Spanking Blog posted a lighthearted cover from a pre-WWII pulp magazine, featuring a comic-book style image of a woman rubbing her sore bottom and the story title Should Wives Be Spanked? Men Always Ask.

And that was that … until 2007. The post must have gotten some search engine love at that point, because ever since then, it’s been ever-so-slowly accumulating comments, more than thirty of them over five years. And the comments, almost unanimously, are from people who want to answer the question, as if it were utterly serious. And, no surprise given the context, when it comes to the question of wife spanking, most of the people in that particular slow conversation are for it.

It’s an interesting example of that phenomenon Dr. Faustus likes to talk about, where the internet facilitates discovery and exchange between like-minded people with minority interests.

The last thing I want to do is derail a conversation that’s been ongoing since 2003 (or 1925) so if you feel the urge to participate, please do it there. You already know my own answer: “Only if they ask very nicely…”

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…has a safeword:

Which reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw on a blog somewhere. It said something like “I don’t believe in spanking. Unless she asks nicely first…”

Found this picture on Naked Protesters.

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I laughed when I saw this photo on a tumblr site, because The Nymph is the sort of girl who is unhappy if she wakes up in a hotel room and finds I’ve opened the blinds, even if there are still sheers obscuring all view into the room:

I can just imagine the dialog: “I want you to keep standing there, my dear, for at least five more minutes. That was a good spanking you just got, and there might be someone in the parking lot who is still enjoying the view of your red bottom…”

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