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The Sex Blog Of Record
Monday, October 3rd, 2022 -- by Bacchus
It’s my birthday! My ErosBlog birthday!
Twenty amazing years of sex blogging. Wow. Happy birthday to {gestures wildly around} all of this!
I’ve published this weird little sex blog for two entire decades, almost half my adult life. On this day, October the 3rd, in 2002, I posted a photo of some sexy British toff-ladies baring their breasts (but no nipple!) as part of their light-hearted “protest” against the then-popular political movement to ban their fox-hunting hobby. OG blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit (who’s still going strong) got the link credit.
That all feels like it happened a very long time ago. Because, indeed, it did.
I have a tradition of writing big wordy posts on ErosBlog anniversaries. (You can see many of these linked in the “Similar Sex Blogging” link block at the bottom of the post.) I originally thought that today, I would dump another massive prose load of that sort. However — and this is your cue to breathe a substantial sigh of relief — I thought better of it. Today I will not be ejaculating two thousand or four thousand or ten thousand words of navel-gazing prose. You deserve better. I can’t do much about getting y’all the things you deserve, but in this instance, simply by doing less, I can preserve you from one of my rambling Prose Dumps of Doom.
Instead, I simply want to thank you all. My readers, my commenters, my loyal patrons, my random accidental visitors… all of you! Without you, none of this would have been possible. Certainly not twenty long years of it! My heartfelt thanks to everyone.
Five years ago I wrote:
Well, friends, here we are in 2017, and we fuckin’ made it. But blogs in general and sex blogs in particular are not just quaint by this point, they’re positively obsolete. I don’t mind saying that 2022 is starting to look like it might be a serious reach for ErosBlog.
A reach? I was right about that. But here we remain, a little older and perhaps somewhat the worse for wear. I’ll take it!
My thoughts on the future of ErosBlog would have been in the big prose lump I spared you all today. Don’t worry. I expect to write about that, and much more, in several 20th-anniversary posts appearing throughout the month. Possible topics include my undiminished mania for curating and attributing porn and erotic art, the sorry state of the open web in general and/or the porn web in particular, the triumph of #pornocalypse in the social media age, the precarious future (because futures are always precarious) of ErosBlog, my never-to-be-realized dream of a genuinely-distributed pornocalypse-proof internet, and probably at least one dreary plea for your further Patreon support.
Twenty long years! I know, I don’t believe it either. Three years ago, on the 17th anniversary, I wrote “It’s a long time to run a website.” That was true, but so is what I wrote next: “I am, however, far from done.”
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, October 3rd, 2014 -- by Bacchus
Hey, look! It’s been twelve years since ErosBlog’s first post.
For extra lulz, check out what the blog looked like when it was four days old (on October 7, 2002) as preserved by the Internet Archive:
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, May 10th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m delighted to announce the latest major revision of the WordPress theme files that power how ErosBlog appears on your screen. Please let me know how it works for you!
Major changes include:
- Larger fonts everywhere. My original designer, seven years ago, used a then-trendy style of reducing all the font sizes roughly 25% from browser default as controlled by the user. Seven years later, I’m now somewhat wiser about respecting user/client preferences. So, fonts now bigger by default. And if you change them in your browser, stuff should work better, because:
- Flexible spacing. The old design had a lot of fixed-pixel spacing. I haven’t rooted them all out, but now, for the most part, white space expands and contracts depending on the available screen space and the browser-default or user-adjusted font sizing.
- Responsive(ish) design. A major goal of this effort was to make Erosblog less painful to use on phones and tablets and even very large screens. I’ve made feeble efforts in the past, but was hampered by my utter lack of comprehension regarding things like viewports and media queries. Now, as you view ErosBlog on increasingly smaller screen sizes, bits of the layout go away or get smaller and some mobile-friendly nav elements appear. As you move onto bigger screens, things should also look better, due to the fixed-pixel sizing mostly being gone.
Please, please, please let me know if ErosBlog is hopelessly or uselessly borked in any way for you on any device at any screen size. Leave a comment (or email me) with the problem you’re seeing, and don’t forget to mention your device and/or operating system and browser.
I do ask that you be gentle. Coding work like this is rather hard for me; I’m a liberal-arts graduate with no training for it and little understanding (all hard-won). I’m very much of a cargo-cult programmer, building stuff by cutting and pasting bits of other stuff that already works while having imperfect comprehension (or none at all!) of how the stuff fails or why it ever worked in the first place. I’ve probably got fifty hours into this latest revision, and I know how far from done I am. But if I wait to release it until it’s done and perfect, it will never be released. So, here are some major items that I hope to still deal with “later”:
- Fundamental design. Seven years ago my designer flaked with the job half done, and I ended up pasting up a Frankenstein monster consisting of her visuals wrapped around a skeleton of my old table-based structure that I originally wrote for a different content-management system and then ported to Greymatter before porting it again to WordPress. I’d dearly love to start over and write a new template from the ground up, with nothing borrowed from websites I “built” in 2000 by copy-pasting html from other sites. But for a cargo-cult programmer like me, that’s a huge job. Realistically, it may never happen.
- Validation and accessibility. My cargo-cult cut-and-paste CSS is full of errors, kludges (can you find the same-color-as-background periods used for spacing?), and deprecated stuff. There’s an enormous amount of work still to be done in cleaning it up, getting it to validate, and modernizing it so that elements actually relate to function in a good HTML5 sort of way.
- Bandwidth friendliness. ErosBlog was born at a time when slow dialup internet connections were thrashing their final death throes, and it’s always been operated on the assumption that readers are at desktops with large screens and bandwidth that’s too cheap to meter. Now that lots of ISPs have bandwidth caps and most smartphones are on limited data plans, there’s a lot more care that could go into serving content in ways that aren’t so bandwidth-wasteful.
- Visual polish. My only styling concern during this pass was to make sure that nothing broke horribly. There’s a whole lot of minor visual improvements that I plan to be working on for the next few weeks.
So, what was the boot-to-the-ass that finally got me motivated to do this very painful redesign? Simply, this: in the slightly more than two years since I got my first smartphone, I’ve gotten more and more dependent on it. It finally got to be a big enough fraction of my internet use that I began noticing my own aversive reaction whenever I’d accidentally click through onto a site that sucked (or was completely useless) at 320-pixels. And then I realized I had the very same aversive reaction when I landed at ErosBlog and had to try and pinch-zoom the content column large enough to read. And if I myself was having that reaction, how many others must be? Meanwhile, I kept landing with pleasure on mobile-friendly sites that put the content front-and-center and politely vanished most of the huge nav and advertising stuff that fills large screens. Eventually I couldn’t stand it. I want people to feel like that when they land on ErosBlog! So, I dug in and got to work.
Hopefully it’s better now. Do you know anybody who used to read ErosBlog but gave up in disgust because it sucked on their phone? If so, I’d be forever in your debt if you’d ask them to pretty-please have another look. Thanks ever so much.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Thursday, February 28th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m going to be self-indulgent today (Ha! Don’t ask about all the other days…) and post some words about the reputed death of blogging. Karl Elvis has been a friend of ErosBlog since forever, and here’s what he had to say about six weeks ago, on the occasion of his blog’s ninth anniversary:
As social media finally got a real foothold, blogging crashed and burned.
That probably makes sense. Blogging was a fad, something of an era; every fucking person on the internet seemed to have a blog for a six month period there. And then they didn’t. Abandoned blogs are the ghost town of the decade; people will tour them some day, dodging tumble weeds and spam links and stealing mementos.
Actually they won’t. Because unlike ghost towns, blogs leave nothing behind but empty hearts and minds. No blood no guts no brains at all.
There are exceptions, obviously. Great writing happened, and is still happening, in the context of blogs. No, the issue wasn’t a lack of content, it was the opposite. It was that signal-to-noise problem that chases us around the internet; when something works, really works, it has the life span of a snowflake. Perfect, brilliant, ephemeral, and then gone, lost in the waves of it’s own success. The sheer mass of irrelevancy and stupidity swamped the goodness and buried it.
But you know that. And anyway you’re not reading; who reads blogs anymore?
I wonder if Karl hasn’t accidentally put his finger on one of the reasons why I’ve recently gotten weirdly obsessive about tracking down image relationships and attributions. Some people do still read blogs, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I never did any long-read “great writing” for writing’s sake; I was always about the “hey, look at this!” with my value added being a snarky sentence or at most a few paragraphs of commentary. On a bad day, it can look (and feel) like I’m just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress; what makes it a good day is the feeling of value added, of context provided. Boost signal; filter noise.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!
I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?
I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!
There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.
Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, September 23rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Alternative title: How To “Waste” A Fine Morning.
Dateline ErosBlog, 2003: I published a wallet photo of a vintage blowjob.
Most of a decade later, I see a similar photo on Tumblr, and I’m thinking “This woman looks familiar!”
So I do some image searching (on the web and on my hard drives) until I find the best available watermark-free version. And then I rummage my archives to find the other picture of the same woman that I posted back in 2003. Fast to say, but an hour’s gone already. Is it the same woman?
Yes! It sure looks like her when I make a side-by-side composite:
Hair is the same, and most importantly, she’s wearing the same striped hose. It’s her!
But now I’m in a frenzy of pointless data acquisition. I want to find and post the best available versions of these pictures, which turns out to be these (click for full size versions, the biggest and cleanest I found):
That’s another hour gone, spent in pop-up-hell ruski image forums and ancient foreign-language blogspot archives, satisfying myself that none of the versions in Google image search are better than the ones I’ve already found. I don’t find the holy grail I’m always looking for (glowing 1200-pixel-wide HD scans of these fragile old cracked wallet prints) but I do find another, wider, less-cracked, less-cropped version of the second one. Did you like the striped hose? That’s good, because now you can see more:
At various times over the years I’ve encountered life coaching advice that boils down to “figure out what you’re good at and really enjoy doing, then figure out how to turn it into a career.” Well, this post right here is what I’m good at. Rummaging through old porn, spotting something unique or special, making connections based on tricky searches and faint memories, finding kinky gems in badly-curated collections (including the biggest dusty porn closet of them of all, the internet), making do with unreliable metadata clues and suggestive image details, putting it all together with an artful crop or an illuminating caption or a half-witty line or a fantasy notion gestured at in an overwrought sentence or two. And it’s all “a waste of time” because at the end, all I’m generating is not-so-deep insights like “hey, these two vintage pics are from the same shoot” or “wow, here’s another picture where you can see her nifty lingerie better”. Maybe some people other than me are amused, but it’s not important to anybody … not even me (most days).
Still — it’s what I’m good at, and I really enjoy doing it. For awhile there (back in the mid-oughts, before the feral-debt bubble burst, when many ordinary people still could still afford to put porn subscriptions on their cheap-and-easy credit cards and porn “piracy” wasn’t yet a fundamental computer-literacy survival skill for everyone who doesn’t golf with Money Boo Boo) it paid the bills. These days? Not so much. With the ten-year ErosBlog anniversary just a couple of weeks away, I find myself wondering something I never expected to wonder. Not “Do I want to keep doing this?” Because — amazingly — I find that I still do. If desire were the only issue, I’d be confident that I could steer ErosBlog through yet another decade. And even if the commercial porn industry were to thrash its last ugly death rattle sometime in the next ten years, there’s enough stuff out there to keep me happily threshing-and-winnowing for a lifetime.
Nope, the only issue for me is, where am I gonna find the computronium? It doesn’t grow on trees, and web traffic doesn’t monetize as automatically as it used to back when we were all hiding from crack-addled refi mortgage brokers trying to sign us up for too-cheap-to-meter debt. The challenge of ErosBlog’s second decade, clearly, is going to be finding ways to keep the server up, and me “playing” at my keyboard.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, August 19th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
It’s been three months since the last “Best of ErosBlog” installment. That was 2004; previously we saw 2003 and 2002. At this rate I might get one or two more done before the genuine 10 year anniversary in October.
2005 went down like this:
- We encountered sexual multitasking of a particularly impressive kind, in the form of a gentlemen who could simultaneously bone his woman and peel his figging ginger: Peeling Root Vegetables During Sex
- Pac Man’s endless ghost chase got re-imagined as a rough sort of seduction: Pac Man On Viagra
- I reluctantly had to abandon my status as the last man in America who thought Halle Berry’s Catwoman movie wasn’t so bad: Halle Berry, Screw You Too
- We found an anecdote about the time Catherine McKinnon picked the wrong audience to talk to about the alleged horrors of deep throating: Putting Catherine McKinnon in Her Place
- The vocabulary of privilege was not so mainstream back in 2005, or I would have termed this an example of unselfconscious female privilege: The World Is Different For Men And Women
- I’m going to slide this in here just because it’s the first time (only time?) I ever had occasion to mention my sister on ErosBlog. Also, nice mental image of Penelope Cruz, duct tape: Marriage: The Shit Changes
- This might still be my all-time favorite vintage oral sex picture: Oral Sex For The Happy Woman
- I got to thinking just a little bit too hard about the making of a visually-arresting bondage photo: Astonishing Bondage Photo
- Making light of alternative-religion sexual practices is generally not something I’d put in my “Best of” category; I do the “ha ha loonies” sometimes, but I’m not sure it’s ever as funny as it seems at the time. Nonetheless, I stand behind this post title as worthy: The Holy Handkerchief of Cum-Saving
- It is always dangerous to let other people caption your art: Here Comes Johnny With His Pecker In His Hand
- Was it really only seven years ago that Dan Savage had to lay down the law about oral sex? Sometimes I forget just how fast this culture is moving! Oral Sex Is Standard Equipment
- Sometimes just finding a thing is the sex blogging victory. Example: this account of anal sex with a coughing wife: Whooping Cough Sex
- Speaking of how fast the culture has moved: it was also just seven years ago that a website by an American porn producer that mixed actual bondage and actual sex was a surprising, nearly-unprecedented thing: Sex And Submission
- A rare childhood reminiscence from me, in which I recollect having to explain dildos to a grown-up: “What’s A Dildo?”
- Of all the things I’ve written on ErosBlog over the years, this disquisition on the ethics of being a porn consumer is perhaps my second-favorite: Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked
- I argued against the wearing of clothes in bed. It got a LOT of comments: Lame Reasons For Wearing Clothes In Bed
- A very vivid image: Four Lips, Two Cherries
- The dirtiest picture I’ve ever published on ErosBlog, I think: Dirty Picture
- The comment thread on this post was where I first found out just how many people are scared of the idea of female ejaculation and would like to pretend it’s not a thing: Diary of A Squirter
- A post about why so many internet comments about erotic photography are body-negative and body-critical: Crapping All Over Beauty
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, April 20th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
My sporadic series in honor of ErosBlog’s upcoming tenth anniversary continues. We already did 2002 and 2003, now here are some of the “best of” posts from 2004:
- “If you don’t love pussy THIS MUCH…” Dumb young men.
- Definitely the highlight of 2004 for me was when The Nymph and I had our first visit. I’d been lonely for a long time before that. I don’t know if anybody but me ever got the joke where I linked a .wav file of Gerald Ford saying “Our long national nightmare is over.” But it still makes me grin! The Nymph In My Net: Oh What Fun
- Eight dollars very well spent. Funny thing, this handy kitchen tool vanished from our lives quite soon thereafter, and was never seen again! The Nymph In My Net: Ticklish
- Remember when sex bloggers were such hot media properties that tabloid reporters were going around offering cash money for tips that would help them identify the anonymous ones? Kind of funny how quaint that seems now, but it wasn’t funny to the (mostly female) bloggers who were the targets, back in the day: Tabloid Sleaze Emails
- All these years later and I still can’t think of a better example of why “I read about it on the internet” is such an insufficient justification for trying out a new idea: “Honest, Officer, It Was Marital Advice I Read On A Blog”
- Men and women. I think it’s Samuel Johnson I’m plagiarizing from when I say “two species divided by a common language.” I’m moved to steal that joke by this post featuring a woman fretting incomprehensibly over the aesthetics of blowjobs: The Blowjob Letters: A Correspondence With Aliens
- Remember that innocent age when it was actually news that the laws designed to protect children were being used to punish and stigmatize them, instead? Sadly, these days this is just routine, it doesn’t even make headlines: 15 Year Old Girl Criminally Charged For Self Abuse
- Sometimes guys can be real dicks. But sometimes they just need to be educated: A Basic Rule For Gentlemen
- All these years later, I still can’t believe somebody actually complained that “My child’s head literally exploded.” Kid Views Oprah, Head Explodes
- Sometimes in writing this blog I’ve managed to be controversial in ways I never intended. For instance: Markets In Sex, Redux
- This post is noteworthy because it’s the first appearance of what I’ve since learned to call Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet: Why Blogging Services Suck
- This post features one of the most memorable comments ever left on ErosBlog: The Price Of Anal Sex
- To date, this remains the only pop-fiction discussion of prostate milking that I’ve ever encountered: Half-Cocked Canadian
- I think I should have titled this one “Teddy Bears And Hookers.” What I actually called it: Tales From The Nevada Desert
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, March 25th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
As I mentioned last time, ErosBlog will be ten years old in October. So I’m rooting through the archives on an occasional basis to pull together some “best of” posts. Today’s list is from 2003, if you can remember that far back:
- I think this may have been the first post where I really started defending porn on the basis of its genuine utilitarian benefits: Bacchus on Porn
- An object lesson on photoshopped porn: Alas, Fun With Photoshop
- This was the post where I learned the vital lesson that no matter how obscure ErosBlog was then or is now, if you say something about a named person on the internet, they may just show up in your comments to remonstrate with you about what you said. Also: never have felt the same about citrus fruit after this. Got Orange Juice?
- Was this the first of many many times I linked one of Dan Savage’s Savage Love columns? I think it might be. Also notable for my cynical joke about marriage: Let’s Not Make This Harder Than It Needs To Be
- I tried then and I try now to stay away from war and politics, but it’s impossible to talk about sex at any great length without war and politics creeping into the discussion. Early in the Iraq war, I had this to say on the sexualization of artillery: Money Shot.
- It’s really a bad idea to let me start tinkering with old song lyrics. Bill Grogan’s Girl
- I didn’t say so at the time, but the reason I posted this artwork was that it reminded me strongly of an unattainable girl I had a crush on in college: Veil Dancer
- The first dirty joke I both heard and comprehended back when I was just a sprout. Illustrated: What’s Better Than Two Roses On A Piano?
- Sex news you can actually use! If you’re flexible enough, that is: Interview With An Autofellator
- This may be the first post in which I started failing to conceal my somewhat radical views on the toxicity of the traditional cubical-rat wage economy: Work Is The Curse Of The Drinking Class
- I’m still a little reticent by modern sex blogging standards, but in the early days of this blog I revealed astonishingly little about my own thinking on sexual matters. Here’s an early departure from that policy: Olfactory Delights
- Why I hate warning pages, adult verification check-the-box traps, and anything else that interferes with the smooth operation of hyperlinking technology. Yeah, it’s a little bit political. THIS Is The Culture War?
- One of my very rare forays into the provision of safer sex information, along with the reason why they are so rare: Soon To Be A Daddy
- How long have I hated the “NSFW” label? Forever: Safe To Cuddle
- This is still one of the best spam emails I ever got: Found Poetry
- The dirtiest little yellow animated smile icon I ever saw. All these years later, yup it still is: Raunchiest Smiley Ever
- There were other memorable posts in 2003, but none more momentous. Here’s the very first post on ErosBlog mentioning The Nymph, with whom I was then carrying out a nascent internet romance via email and ICQ. At the time of this post there had been four phone calls. Less than four months later, we were living together. Today? Still together, still very happy with each other. Never let anybody tell you that you can’t find true love over the internet! The Nymph In My Net: Beginnings
- For as long as I’ve been sex blogging, the gender imbalance among sex bloggers has been noticeable. Here’s one theory about it: Men And Sex Blogs
Similar Sex Blogging:
Friday, February 10th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
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…
Saturday, April 16th, 2011 -- by Bacchus
I’ve described my goal here at ErosBlog as blogging about sex and porn with an unapologetic, unabashed male gaze … while striving not to be a complete dickhead about sex, about women, about porn models, about sex workers. The degree to which I succeed may be debatable, but I’ve never felt a lustful-yet-respectful male gaze was an impossible or unreasonable goal. I’m aware, yes, of a political camp that equates gaze with disrespect, or with objectification that in its own turn is equated with disrespect — but as a political matter, I categorically reject those views, and attempt to refute them, by example, to the best of my ability.
So you’ll appreciate the fascination with which I read this from Miss Maggie Mayhem:
The young man I pass who looks me up and down and gives me a sincere smile and eye contact does not have the same intentions as the car filled with young men matching my pace and shouting at me as I walk down the street. Respect is not indicated by abstaining from a sexual gaze. Respect is recognizing the fact that it might not be mutual and being alright with that and not acting in a way that imposes it on another human being against their own desire and autonomy. To say that you shouldn’t ever look at a stranger across the room and get turned on is to say that you shouldn’t ever fall in love at first sight.
You preach it, sister!
Sunday, November 14th, 2010 -- by Dr. Faustus
This started as a slightly snarky idea inspired by a post earlier this week by PZ Myers, who reported on the research of Professor Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University. PZ points us to coverage in an Australian newspaper. It was like this:
In their research they asked 16 women to “self-stimulate” until they achieved orgasm, while lying under a blanket in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Despite the clinical surroundings, all the women were able to achieve their goal, mostly in less than five minutes — although some took up to 20.
I had three quick reactions.
(1) Squee! (I mean, tube girls, right?)
(2) This seems like a research theme we’ve seen before at ErosBlog.
(3) Perhaps I went into the wrong academic field.
Professor Komisaruk went on to find that women have it better than men, maybe.
“In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands each time they orgasmed. Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart,” Professor Komisaruk said. “So the evidence is that woman tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several of them.”
And that’s where the snark set in: “I’m glad we have science to tell us that, Professor.”
Of course, what we have here is a very old theme. We have mythology to tell us this as well. You all do remember Tiresias, yes?
Tiresias, in the course of an adventurous life, managed to be both a man and a woman at various times, and as a consequence of his experiences got drawn into a dispute between the Head God Jupiter and Mrs. Head God Juno about whether males or females get more pleasure out of sex. Ovid recounts the story in Metampohoses III 316-338.
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Original Latin text via Perseus.
Dumque ea per terras fatali lege geruntur
tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi,
forte Iovem memorant, diffusum nectare, curas
seposuisse graves vacuumque agitasse remissos
cum Iunone iocos et “maior vestra profecto est,
quam quae contingit maribus” dixisse “voluptas.”
Illa negat. Placuit quae sit sententia docti
quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.
Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva
corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu;
deque viro factus (mirabile) femina septem
egerat autumnos. Octavo rursus eosdem
vidit, et “est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae”
dixit “ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,
nunc quoque vos feriam.” Percussis anguibus isdem
forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.
Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa
dicta Iovis firmat. Gravius Saturnia iusto
nec pro materia fertur doluisse, suique
iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte.
At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam
facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto
scire futura dedit, poenamque levavit honore. |
English translation by poet A.S. Kline.
While these things were brought about on earth because of that fatal oath, and while twice-born Bacchus’s cradle remained safe, they say that Jupiter, expansive with wine, set aside his onerous duties, and relaxing, exchanging pleasantries, with Juno, said “You gain more than we do from the pleasures of love.” She denied it. They agreed to ask learned Tiresias for his opinion. He had known Venus in both ways.
Once, with a blow of his stick, he had disturbed two large snakes mating in the green forest, and, marvellous to tell, he was changed from a man to a woman, and lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same snakes again and said “Since there is such power in plaguing you that it changes the giver of a blow to the opposite sex, I will strike you again, now.” He struck the snakes and regained his former shape, and returned to the sex he was born with.
As the arbiter of the light-hearted dispute he confirmed Jupiter’s words. Saturnia, it is said, was more deeply upset than was justified and than the dispute warranted, and damned the one who had made the judgement to eternal night. But, since no god has the right to void what another god has done, the all-powerful father of the gods gave Tiresias knowledge of the future, in exchange for his lost sight, and lightened the punishment with honour.
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So take that, Science Guy! A mere poet got there first! (I’ll have to leave it to Bacchus to explain how he manages to be born twice.)
But of course, since I’m characterized by Faustian curiosity I had to dig a little deeper into the case of Professor Komisaruk, and found that he actually has a potential technology coming out of his research which is using these fMRI images to learn to think yourself to orgasm. Using images of your own brain to provide feedback, you learn to do what you otherwise would have required actual frictive contact with your own body to do. He discusses the possibility in a short video clip I found online (look here if the video does not embed properly):
Your own brainscan as porn! Aside from being as triumphant a vindication of Rule 34 as I have ever seen, that’s cool beyond belief.
I really did go into the wrong academic field.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Thursday, September 14th, 2006 -- by Bacchus
Editorial Note as of 2015: This FAQ is obsolete in many respects. My apologies. — Bacchus
I get asked a lot of questions (both by email and in my comments) and some of them are Frequently Asked Questions. So, for ease of future reference, here’s a FAQ. Comments are welcome.
Erosblog FAQ Table of Contents:
Linking Questions: How do I get an ErosBlog link?
Moderation Questions: What happened to my comment?
Attribution Questions: What’s the source of this?
Advertising Questions: Can I buy a link or banner?
Press Queries: Can I interview you?
BLOG LINKING
Question: Would you like to exchange links?
Answer: Sorry, but almost certainly not. I don’t “trade” links. No, really, I almost never do. I link to sites I think my readers might like, and I encourage you to do the same. As Guy Kawasaki puts it:
I don’t get this “exchanging links” thing. IMHO, you should link to a blog if you believe it’s good for your readership. The other blogger should link to back your blog if she believes it’s good for her readership. In a perfect world, linking is about quality, not reciprocation.
A link trade offer translates to: “I don’t really like your site enough to link to it. If I did, I’d already have your link up. But, even though your site isn’t worth linking to, I’ll do it anyway… if you’ll link back.”
Sorry, but if that’s how you feel, I’m not interested.
Question: So, if you don’t do link exchanges, how do I get my new blog listed on ErosBlog?
Answer: So sorry, but you probably don’t. So many new blogs start strong and promising, but they fade after a few posts, or after a few weeks, or after a few months. Most of the “new” blogs I add to my blogroll have been going strong for a year or more. Otherwise, the link maintenance chore of deleting moribund blogs gets completely out of hand.
An exception to this is if I catch myself doing multiple posts about a newer blog. If I like your blogging enough to link it a few times, your blog will probably wind up on my blogroll. No linkback required, although it never hurts — nobody’s immune to flattery.
Question: OK, but I’ve been blogging for awhile. If you don’t trade links, what do I have to do to get a link on ErosBlog?
Answer: The honest answer is that you have to tickle my fancy with your blog. But I can’t define how to do that. I can, however, offer some “Do” and “Don’t” tips. This is not some dictatorial manifesto, these are not hard and fast “rules” I pulled out of my ass, these are just advice, heavily colored by my idiosyncratic blogging tastes:
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DO send me an email linking to a recent blog post you made that you think I might like, with a sentence about what it’s about. I probably won’t answer your mail, but I frequently do look at these, when I have time. It’s the best way to get me to look at your blog, much better than just sending a link and saying “Please have a look.”
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DO link to me. I know that sounds hypocritical, when I don’t do link exchanges, but it’s really not. A link is a compliment, whereas a link trade offer is a veiled insult. Compliments work, and flattery will get you everywhere. Plus, I do read my logs with great curiosity, so having traffic coming from your blog is guaranteed to get me looking at it.
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DO participate in the ErosBlog comments. Write substantive comments, ones with multiple sentences or even paragraphs, to distinguish yourself from the drive-by “Hot pic!” link droppers. If your comments are valuable, they will be noticed, and I’ll be clicking your link to see what else you have to say.
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DO make sure your site looks like a blog. Too much advertising (as in, I can’t find your blog posts for all the flashing banners, or the first post appears “below the fold” because of your “above the fold” advertising) discourages linking. So does not having a blogroll. As the adult blogging tips at Spanking Blog put it: “I get tons of link requests from ‘bloggers’ who don’t link to anybody. They use blog software, and they write something every day, but they don’t participate in the blogging community. They don’t link to anyone and they don’t have a blog roll. I don’t understand this mentality. I mean, why would you ask other people to link to you, if you can’t be bothered to link to anyone else?”
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DON’T (oh, please don’t) “ask permission” to link to my blog. Everyone in the world should already know that the fundamental root reason for putting something on the internet is to invite people to link to it. If I didn’t want links, you couldn’t link to me. If you can see me, you already have permission to link to me. And so, after the first thirty or so, these “May I link to you?” requests begin to look and feel like a sneaky passive-aggressive way of saying “please look at my blog.” If that’s what you want, you’re way better off just saying so.
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DON’T hope for a link if your ‘blog’ is a spammy porn blog with no content. I don’t have anything against porn, but most porn blogs are boring. If all you’ve got is generic porn thumbnails, tired porn marketing text (“look at this hot bitch fingering her slut mom”), and links to pay sites, don’t bother. Of course, if you’ve got entertaining commentary about the porn, that’s a whole different ball game. Blogs featuring high-quality carefully-selected porn in an intelligent way also have a shot, if the advertising is kept to a reasonable dull roar.
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DON’T ask for a free link if you know you should really be inquiring about advertising rates. Do you have a marketing program and/or an advertising budget? Is your site or blog principally for the purpose of selling something or drawing attention to your products? Are advertisements or marketing materials the most prominent thing on your site? If so, you should be asking me about ad rates.
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DON’T be a drive-by link-dropper. Link droppings are not attractive, and we try not to step in them. By link dropping, I mean leaving comments like “Hot!” or “Nice pic!” or “Cool!” — stuff that’s shorter than the URL you so carefully typed into the box provided. Lots of new bloggers do this; it’s the lazy spam version of the “Do participate in the comments” advice above. Trouble is, once you are in my head as a spamming link dropper, the odds of me ever visiting your site (much less linking to it) decline toward zero. Good comments usually take the form of short paragraphs, not sentence fragments.
COMMENT MODERATION
Question: Why did you delete/moderate my comment?
Answer: Most likely because you weren’t nice. I ask ErosBlog commenters to be civil, friendly, polite, nice. And I enforce that. We don’t welcome flaming, aggressive debating style, snark, or even strong sarcasm. Yes, I do break these rules myself, sometimes. But I live here.
You may also have been moderated for substance (or, more usually, lack of it.) If your comment was condemning any sexual practice or kink, suggesting that anybody or anything is “sick”, calling anybody names, saying something rude about someone’s physical appearance, inviting people to visit your own website, or saying anything at all that’s got nothing to do with the post the comment is made under, that would explain why you don’t see it.
Sharing your fanciful sexual intentions (“I’d like to jump her bones, heh heh”) is another good way to get your comment moderated, especially when done crudely. (Explanation) Also, we don’t play the “Is it real or is it Photoshop?” game here, because (a) comments that a photo is not real tend to expressly or implicitly imply that the commenter is smarter and more perceptive than whoever posted the photo, which is rude, and (b) such comments lead to flamewars because everybody has an opinion, but nobody has any data. Even a friendly reservation (“I’m not sure if that’s real, but if it is…”) will often get moderated, because it invites twenty-seven unwelcome comments on the “real or Photoshop” topic.)
Here are some posts I’ve made over the years about my moderation policy:
Don’t Be A Dick
Condemnators Redux
Crapping All Over Beauty
Sure Cure For Spammers
A Note For Our New Spammers (by Aphrodite)
Blogging Without Comments
Cracking Down On Handcrafted Comment Spam
Spam Robot Finally Rolls 00 Versus Turing
Trying Harder At The Turing Test
Civilization, Assholes, and Internet Communities
ATTRIBUTION QUESTIONS
Question: Where did you find the picture you just posted? Is there a link? What’s the source of this?
Answer: I actually get a little offended by these questions, and they usually don’t make it through moderation. Since October of 2002 I’ve been faithfully posting and linking. If I know the source of something, I post the link. Without fail. Either the link where I got it, or the original source (if I know it) plus a link to where I found it. Every. Damned. Time.
You don’t see a link? It’s because I don’t freakin’ have one.
How is that possible? Well, let’s see. First of all, people mail me stuff and ask not to be credited. Or, there’s the fact that I’ve been downloading dirty pictures from Usenet and the web since about 1994. Right-click-and-save-to-hard-drive has been a reflex for more than a decade. These days, if I think “I’m gonna blog this” I’ll make sure to save source info too, but that doesn’t help with the half million images I accumulated before I started blogging.
If there’s no link provided, it’s because I don’t have one. OK?
Question: Do you know where I can find more pictures like the one you posted?
Answer: No. If I did, there’d probably be a link. Otherwise, Google is your friend.
Question: Will you please email me some porn?
Answer: Hell no. Use Google. Sheesh! (I actually get this one at least once a week.)
ADVERTISING INQUIRIES
Question: Can I buy a link or a banner?
Answer: Sure! Just drop me an email with the site you’d like to advertise, and I’ll send you a rate sheet. Or just check the sidebars for “your ad here” style links — more and more of my advertising space is being sold through brokers these days. The exception is probably text links. For these, please be prepared to buy at least six months of advertising at a time, and to pay in advance at rates that exceed the cost of brokered banner space. If you’re selling sex-negative or dangerous or worthless crap — herbal penis pills, breast enlargement creme, porn for the audience that despises women — please don’t bother. And don’t even ask if you want to buy generic “keyword” anchor text; I don’t blind link my users to random destinations for any price, and “sex toys” or “free cams” doesn’t tell them enough about where they are going. You’ll probably need to put your brand somewhere in the link, so the link looks like the kind of links human beings actually post and use.
Question: Would you like to join my affiliate program and then put up my banner for free?
Answer: Almost certainly not. Most affiliate programs suck, especially the cookie-cutter ones that use “standard” affiliate software. The stats reporting is bad, the percentage paid is bad, the affiliate program software is rude or clueless or tailored for non-adult sites, the terms of service are ridiculous and one-sided or unfit for bloggers, or the product is bad.
On the other hand, there are a handful of adult businesses that have unique products, great customer service, a sex-positive attitude, a strong brand or reputation — if that describes your company, and you have an affiliate-friendly program too, by all means let me know about it. If, however, you’ve already asked and the response you got was a link to this FAQ, it’s because your program is covered by the paragraph above.
Question: Can I buy a blog post talking about my site / product / event / whatever?
Answer: Email me. It’s possible. But it’s not cheap, and there’s always an identifying “sponsored post” banner so readers will know what’s going on. I won’t shill for your product and pretend I’m just blogging normally; that’s not an advertising service that ErosBlog will provide.
Question: Would you like to review my product?
Answer: If it’s a virtual / downloadable thing, no. There’s just no time, and it amounts to unpaid work for me.
However, if it’s a physical thing (a sex toy, DVD, book, or whatever) you might have a shot. The Nymph and I enjoy getting free stuff in the mail. Reviews are not guaranteed, but if you do get one, you can count on it taking forever. I’d guess we (eventually) review about twenty percent of the stuff that gets sent for review, so you’re taking a chance. Email for the review item shipping address. [2012 update: We do almost no reviews now. But we still like to play with free sex toys if they are sufficiently unique. And there’s always that chance that you’ll get a mention if your product is sufficiently impressive. So, sending review stuff is almost certainly a losing game, but if you’re an optimist or really confident about your product, it might be worth a try.]
PRESS INQUIRIES AND INTERVIEWS
Question: I’d like to interview you for my blog or publication. Is that possible?
Answer: Sure. Email me. But before you contact me, you might want to have a look at the interviews I’ve already given:
Interview With Bacchus (Sunni’s Salon)
The Buccaneer of Bacchanalia (Susie Bright)
Understanding Humankind (Atrocidades)
Revision History:
9/14/06 – FAQ first published
10/16/06 – added sentence about moderation of feedback on photos
10/24/06 – added sentences about prohibition on “real or Photoshop” game
7/20/07 – added Guy Kawasaki link exchange quote
3/6/12 – numerous updates
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